


Closed Record

by WhenISayFriend



Series: Five Hundred and One [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: 501 days, Archaeology, Emotional Whump, Hearing Voices, Iraq, John's past, Manipulation, Mourning, Murder, Obsession, POV John Watson, POV Third Person, Post Reichenbach, Therapy, loss of reality, relentless self-pity, therapist with doubtful morals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-12-27
Packaged: 2017-12-11 15:41:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 80,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/800363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhenISayFriend/pseuds/WhenISayFriend
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were 501 days before. These are John's 501 days after Reichenbach...<br/>The story is told mostly through John's therapy sessions with Ella Thompson, in what my beta - the incredibly talented Impractical Beekeeping - aptly, if jokingly, named TherapyVerse...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Shell-Shocked

He had never imagined he could be more shell-shocked than he had been after the incident in Afghanistan, the one that brought him home, numb and useless and feeling like a dead thing. After all, he had exhibited all the worst symptoms of trauma then: limping painfully though he had been shot in the shoulder, his mind so messed up that his system could obviously no longer tell one limb from another. Sleep had been his enemy ever since, his treacherous mind replaying heat, sand, gore and death in minute detail, in an unending circle, making him as invalid in mind as he was in body. He had hated every second of this so-called 'life' after the war – and himself more than he could ever have believed possible. It had been hell. Or so he had thought.

He knew better now.

"Say it," his – still useless – therapist insisted.

He kept staring at her, wondering at her complete ignorance of his inner turmoil, and at his apparent masochistic tendencies that made him keep his appointments with her. He really didn't know what had made him come here this time, knowing for sure that she could not help him, nor would he EVER give in to her insistently repeated question.

What really had him on edge was exactly this: He _knew_. What he was doing to himself – or rather not doing – was profoundly stupid, not helping, not getting him anywhere at all.

Then again, it was all so obvious to him that he could not conceive of the others' blindness: Harry, Mrs Hudson, Sarah, Greg, and – Mycroft. And no one else anymore, by the way. His stomach did a painful roll and he moved his thoughts elsewhere. Not now. He was not going down that road now, and surely not here. This again only served to show how utterly ridiculous his behaviour was becoming. This was his goddamned therapist – she, of all people, _should_ know about his pain and heartache – how else could he expect her to help him?

Oh, but this was the sore point: Did he? Want to be helped, that is? He pondered this question for a moment instead of lapsing back into thinking about the others. He moved his gaze from his therapist's expectant face to his own hands, which he should have known was a bad idea. Not good. A deep, suffocating wave of nausea rolled through him, leaving him light-headed and trembling, the crawling sensation filling his chest, radiating out from his stomach to grasp his lungs and heart. The taste of blood was suddenly on his tongue.

"John?"

He did his best to snap out of it but his eyes were glued to his fingers, short nails (bit to the quick, if truth be told) and the scabby cuticles. Of course, he was not seeing any of that now.

"John, stop it!"

The order came harsh and cold, touching on something deeply rooted in his soldier's mind. He raised his eyes abruptly, sitting up straight and gathering his usual air of purposeful detachment around himself like a cloak. He had used it before, this no-nonsense persona of ex-soldier and disillusioned, I've-seen-it-all doctor. He could manage with its help again. The therapist's eyes bored into his.

"You are aware that I know what you're trying to do now, aren't you?" Her voice held no amusement at all and it occurred to John for the first time that maybe he was scaring her a little.

"I should not have come to you again," he mumbled, his first words in the last twenty minutes. His own voice grated on his ears, rusty and – just weird, like something was permanently stuck in his wind-pipe. And he could feel it there, too.


	2. Staying Sound

It had come to him after his last visit here that she – like some of the others – was not so much afraid of him but rather for him. She was unsure that he might not take the only way out of this mess – offing himself. John found he was rather shocked someone could seriously entertain the notion. Did they understand nothing at all, had they even been there when he and Sherlock had met and changed each other? They saw but didn't observe. John pushed the unwanted thought back furiously, actually glad that his therapist finally broke the silence.

"I wonder if you believe merely sitting in my armchair is therapy."

"And I am be-beginning to wonder why you all expect me to kill myself," John threw back, as snarky as he could manage.

Honestly, if there was one thing that had shown Sherlock took any interest in John at all, it had been his 'proving a point' and restoring to John the use of his leg. How could someone so seemingly detached and (self-professedly or was it assumingly?) sociopathic put his finger on the sore spot in his heart like that, with such surety, after knowing John for a few days? And take his ruined 'me' and glue the pieces together like that? How could he know and – even more to the point, why – care enough to re-invent John Watson? So, just no.

"We all?" She asked quietly right, into his thoughts, her eyebrows raised.

John's heart clenched weirdly. The others might be safer to speak about than Sherlock himself, his therapist seemed to think.

"You really don't get it, do you. None of you", he remarked, quite sounding like his old self for once. But completely avoiding answering her question, of course.

"What is there to get, then? If us all being concerned about you is so absurd, what is it we are not seeing, John?"

Sherlock had done more than anyone else ever had to make John whole, to save his body and bored-to-stupidity mind. So there was just no way he could possibly act out the one thing he knew for sure was the last thing his friend would have wanted. Which he knew so deep down it was unquestionable truth. John shivered under the awareness, heavy and so sad, that although he knew this so well, he was failing Sherlock – again – there. He managed to keep those days he could not make himself get up down to a minimum but there was no way around the fact that his hand was unsteady: positively shaking, almost incessantly now; no ignoring the slight stutter he had developed, stumbling over words like painful hurdles between himself and the connection to anyone, anything.

His therapist assumed shock was the cause. He knew it was his sodding brain once again doing that replaying thing that it seemed so prone to: Whenever he was about to use just any turn of phrase he had ever heard from Sherlock's lips, he heard the words echo through his head in Sherlock's inflection, in his best friend's voice, which had John inevitably lose the thread of whatever he was attempting to express, and stutter like an imbecile. How Sherlock would have laughed at him!

"John? Do you even listen to what I'm saying?"

He looked up at her feeling something bordering on guilt; no, he had not heard a word. Why didn't he stay at home to do his thinking? Would be less costly for everyone involved.

"No, s-sorry. I won't harm myself, if that's what you want to hear."

"Oh, really." She shot him a look of utter disbelief, maybe even mixed with unspoken black humour.

And John knew she was right this once: after all he was still able to use a mirror. And what he saw there was clear evidence of him harming himself – if only through neglect. So, he was failing Sherlock in the one last thing he might have had in his power to do to honour their friendship – letting go of what was the last lingering proof of Sherlock's presence in his life, as well. Weird, how he was able to see Sherlock's attention and interest in his well-being only now although it had been there right from the start. (But seeing Sherlock's other side was so much easier, wasn't it?) A knowledge that made what Sherlock had done in front of his eyes just that more incomprehensible. You simply can't kill yourself before your best and only friend's eyes and still expect him to... It made no sense.

But at this point he always saw, replaying in unending loops, their 'goodbye' in that lab at Bart's, which ranked in John's mind high among the most horrible scenes of his life, and that invariably left him with an ugly sense of self-loathing.

He guessed he himself might not have been all that sure of a friend's appreciation (what a good word he had come up with here) and loyalty after being called an automaton, right? He felt tears behind his burning eyes and prayed for them to fall, knowing they would not.

Looking at his days – and nights – trying so much to keep what Sherlock had restored to functioning (John H. Watson) sound, he knew that he had long since become that automaton he had accused Sherlock of being. What would he say about him now? Join me in hell, maybe? John pondered the idea of Sherlock expecting him to die and leave this 'life' behind, and still knew it was ridiculous.

As ridiculous as Sherlock jumping from Bart's. He would have sworn every oath that his best friend would never do that – but he had, killing John just as surely in the process; but Sherlock, being Sherlock, might really not have foreseen this...

"I'm not going to kill myself," he stated finally, carefully circumventing now what he had claimed before.

"See you next week, then, John."


	3. On Pleas and Lying

"Good to see you again, John." It was what she always said. As a goodbye it was invariably _See you next week._

His life was very much what that sentence implied. Counting days, weeks; sitting around empty, counting time in a stranger's house. He had not been in any shape to argue when someone had called his sister to collect him after Sherlock's funeral, someone who must have been afraid of him returning to the flat which he had locked himself up in for four days after Sherlock's body had eventually been conveyed to the morgue at Bart's. And so he had ended up in the last place he had wanted to be stuck – ever: Harriet's middle-class, middle-sized, well-kept, _boring_ terraced house on the outskirts of the city.

"What have you been doing?" Another standard question, he noted. She could not know that this week he actually _had_ done something. He fixed his gaze on the calendar on her desk, his name scrawled in black pen under today's date, calculating back the days he had somehow got through already.

The funeral, he determined, had taken place three and a half weeks ago now. He still could not think about it, let alone all that had led up to it without making quite an exhibition of himself like he had done here last week. Which was also one of the two reasons that he did not talk to Harriet about anything at all.  
But he had kept his promise to Mrs Hudson and accompanied her to Sherlock's grave yesterday – and that had been hard, but he thought he had kept himself together quite spectacularly for the sake of the old lady. Maybe even for Sherlock, however pointless that was. One month gone.

"John, what is it?" she prompted quietly, seeing something in his face.

"Was at the g-grave, yesterday," he offered and felt his face grow red as he remembered his childish pleas to a dead man. Asking favours of the dead was surely no sign of mental stability.

"You surprise me."

John looked up at her in genuine terror at the lowly spoken words, hearing someone else's voice entirely. God, would this never stop? Was he going to keep reliving episodes from his life with Sherlock for the rest of his days?

"So, how do you feel now, John? Tell me."

"Angry," was all he managed, staring right through her.

"At... him?" She tried to coax him into going on.

This gave John pause, although he had said something like this to Mrs Hudson. "He _lied_ to me," he forced out.

A fake. _Yes, sure, Sherlock. You shouldn't have started lying to me in your last moments, being_ so _bad at it_ , John thought with bitterness. And he always had been; while he was often blunt and uncaring about hurting other people's feelings, he did it by telling too much _truth_. Lying was not something he did well. John brought to mind the first time he caught Sherlock at it (at the bank, and yes, he had known it was a lie but was sure he would have caught on to it even if he hadn't; Sherlock's timing was just crap) and shortly after that when they had to gain access to Van Coon's flat. There had invariably been something so _off_ about Sherlock whenever he was pretending...

Just as there was when he had called him standing on the roof top of Bart's.

But the tears had been real that time, scaring John more than anything. He could have believed it all to be a ruse, but for the fact that Sherlock would _not_ have been able to fool him about crying. He had been crying, for real.

So why would he tell him a lie so badly, claiming to be a fake while crying real tears? All that John had been able to come up with was Sherlock somehow trying to prevent something even _worse_ from happening.  
Though what on earth that could have been completely eluded him. What the hell could be so desperate about the situation that Sherlock _killed_ himself. With Moriarty dead. (Ugly speculation abounded in the media, but John would not go into that right now.)  
John shook with anger at the man.

He was unable to shed the feeling that somehow the only explanation had to be Sherlock being selfless in his last moments. Or _believing_ himself to be selfless, which in itself did not make much sense either, but then what about the entire thing did?

"N-no. Not him," he decided eventually, though that was probably only true at that moment. He had changed his mind several times already.

"So, you can forgive him for leaving you?"

John wondered if she really knew what she was doing, phrasing her questions like that. They always tried to force him into reliving _the day_ and realising that he was indeed alone. Learning from past experience, he did not look at his hands this time, which for some reason were often triggers for his lapses into... derangement.

" _He didn't..."_ It was almost on his lips, but somehow, John suddenly realised that this was just what his therapist was waiting for. Trying to catch him out.

No, Sherlock had not left him, as far as he was concerned – again, this might well be a passing state of perception, John realised.

But he himself had left.


	4. Brains and Limbs

"John, what have you done _now_?" Ella greeted him after taking one look at his face.

Sherlock would have complimented her on her observational skills, he guessed. Well, he had probably - in her eyes surely – made a mistake. And it had started right after his last visit here, still pondering the accusation of being left...

On the taxi ride to Harry's place, he had tried looking at his current situation dispassionately for a change. He snorted humourlessly at how little time he spent being himself these days, brooding and losing himself in thoughts winding and circular. And too emotional, all too emotional. Not really like him, was it. Maybe it _was_ a defect after all...

"Are you going to tell me anything today, John? Because I'm really not sure anymore if you want my help at all," Ella stated. Obviously, four sessions of sitting and waiting were pretty much her limit for wasting time.

Maybe he would have been more forthcoming if his speech had finally returned to normal – or maybe it would have returned to normal if he had spoken to her straight away? John gave a weary sigh and started telling her what had happened after last week's appointment.

As the buildings and cars and shops had zoomed past, taking him ever further from the city centre, Mrs Hudson's words had suddenly hit home; he imagined, really pictured, someone else packing away Sherlock's things, the boxes piled some place dark and lonely, like the morgue was – and the grave, of course. _Damn, stop it,_ die he he ordered himself, gripping his quaking fingers with his right. He saw the experiments cleaned away and all scientific equipment transferred to some school where pupils would break them or, worse, where they might not ever be used at all.

"I don't know why that thought made me so angry. It's not like I cared tremendously for his h-horrible ex-experiments in our-," the little possessive pronoun sucked the air from his lungs. He felt Ella's eyes on the side of his face.

"You know, John, that is a normal reaction. Your major problem right now is that you feel you have lost all control. Of anything."

John gave a tiny smirk, one half self-deprecation, the other self-hate. His _major_ problem was that he had not stopped Sherlock from killing himself.

People often likened the experience of losing a... John's mind went blank for a second ...losing _someone_ important to suddenly missing their heart. This analogy clearly was not adequate in the case of Sherlock and him.  
As Sherlock had pointed out more than often enough, John's domain was not doing the thinking, was not the intellectual area, even though it was obvious that John was no simple man in any sense of the word. For one thing, you didn't get through residency (or through the academic training before and during) on your looks alone, which - and that honestly was something John had no illusions about - would not have worked for him anyway. Besides, living with an alcoholic mother and an abusive father – though probably it was the other way round, really – took care of your seeing the world in an uncomplicated manner early on.

Still, with Sherlock, in their relationship, there was no question who was the brains and who was legs, trigger finger, and all other limbs if necessary... And it was perfectly fine with John that way. Strangely it had been _Moriarty_ who had picked up on the fact - seeing it faster than anyone involved, most likely even Sherlock, definitely faster than John... – that John was one other part besides.

It was quite obvious and struck quite a number of people as weird how – and that – John had changed to accommodate Sherlock's presence in his life. Ask Harry.  
John had been well aware of adapting too, but was far too happy with the result and the improvement of his life to see anything questionable about it – he certainly knew that people could change a lot during a lifetime, and he had definitely been in the midst of becoming something _worse_ when he came back from Afghanistan. So, thank you, no, changing and aligning to Sherlock was just fine.

It had, however, taken him a seeming eternity to recognise the ways in which he had begun to change Sherlock in return. Living with him every day, it had been almost imperceptible to him for the longest time – or rather, he had been unable to connect most of what he suspected could be such a change in his friend with himself.

Someone like Sherlock just didn't change for a John Watson.

But, yes, John could well remember the Sherlock from one... and a half years ago, and he did now acknowledge the fact that he had taken John and accepted him as what Moriarty had loosely termed his _heart_.

And now he was indeed like a heart left without its mind and brain, John thought. _Yes, very funny, Sherlock._ He just _knew_ what he would have to say to this: _Nothing's changed then._

"John, you've stopped talking again."

He slowly resurfaced to reality. His therapist was right, he realised. He wondered if he would ever again stop doing vanishing tricks into his own head like this, caught by some thought, some word, some _something_ that set him off thinking about Sherlock and drowning willingly in the current of swirling memories and cogitations.

He gave himself a shake, and met Ella's eyes apologetically. "Maybe you're right. I had to regain some control. So I made a decision."

And even though he had known it was a **bad** idea, he had told the cabbie to change their destination.


	5. Hibernation

Ella had decided, informing John at the end of their last session, that one meeting per month would be enough in future, and John was still puzzling over what had made her say this. Usually you changed treatment like this when a patient was making progress, didn't you?

He **still** had those dreams. He **still** could not cry. He **still** refused to say what she expected him to say. In short, he failed to see any such progress and, he thought, so did she.

So, John suspected that Ella was just miffed and tired of him after what he had told her last month. Despite her talk of his _loss of control_ and _need to make decisions_ , as he had expected, she had been extremely _displeased_ by his decision.  
John had really tried to explain it to her – more than he had ever tried to make her understand anything before. To describe the sensation of missing a crucial element of his life, of himself, which was suffocating when he was sitting all by himself all day, and how, in a stranger's house, he had begun to feel like he wasn't even really there anymore. So, he had figured, maybe Baker Street would at least return him to some sense of reality...

"Now, John. Tell me about your month." Brittle, he thought. Yes, he had been right, she was put out that he had not heeded her advice about getting a new place.

"Four m-more weeks gone," he replied more belligerently than he intended. But he could not stop counting.

"Which you _chose_ to spend in your own private mausoleum, did you not?"

He was shocked by the disdain in her voice as well as the morbid image her words sketched out. But replaying events he had to admit that she was right to be skeptical about his choosing to stay at Baker Street.

.

He had stood in front of the door for a full hour before Mrs Hudson had noticed him out there, staring transfixedly at the door.  
'Oh, John, come in. Lovely of you to come, my dear,' she had crooned, throwing the door wide and rushing towards him.  
 _Just going in to make sure they don't take the wrong things. Just helping with the sorting. Just packing. He couldn't... he wouldn't..._ Right, who was he trying to fool?

In the end he was unable to leave again, it was as simple as that - though _getting_ to and through their flat's door in the first place took every ounce of strength he had left.  
He padded uncertainly through the hall with his breath held, caught between the urge to check every little detail against his mental version to make sure that reality had not changed behind his back during the last weeks and the cold vice-like fear of finding that he could not stomach the reality of it all, so intricately woven with his memories. It was like he could actually see a translucent version of himself visiting 221B for the very first time: his furtive glances around, that painfully slow climb up those stairs back when he still needed the cane, a dozen steps behind the man he had not yet known would become easily the most important person in his life. Later, he had never been more than three steps behind, giving Sherlock freedom of movement while keeping him safe.

Two months gone.

When John's fingers finally touched and turned the handle and he set his first step into the room, with his eyes shut tight, he was struck by two impressions. Firstly, and entirely unsurprisingly, the enormity of what he had lost. Secondly, and even stronger right then, the certainty that he had come home.  
John stood with closed eyes for a long while, drowning in the smell of _home_ , the slightly musty odour of their furniture, a sharp tang of chemicals or cleaners, a hardly tangible whiff of smoke that should not be there; immersing himself in the sound of _home_ , listening to the familiar sounds of Baker Street, the noise of the water pipes and Mrs Hudson's phone ringing downstairs.

He was almost smiling with the feeling of security that wrapped itself around him.

Opening his eyes tentatively, the reality of being completely, utterly alone had struck him in the face; he went completely still, like not moving might ease the pain inside. Back in the war, he remembered, with a bullet in his body, the trick had worked quite well for some time. He preferred being shot to this any time.

John had expected **it** to finally happen, then. But after long minutes of hugging his midriff and keeping impossibly still, taking the room in in every detail, he felt no closer to tears than before – only deeper in despair, and at home at the same time.  
The danger of falling apart any moment seemed to have passed for the time being, and he tried shifting on his feet. With a slight, self-derisive curl of his lips, he took a step forward then, noting that Mrs Hudson had not actually touched a single thing as far as he could tell. His armchair looked at him invitingly but he threw it a suspicious glance, not yet trusting himself to touch anything in this conserved realm of Sherlock's and his.

'Oh, there you are. Shall I make us a cuppa?' Mrs Hudson's voice interrupted his reverie. He nodded. "I wonder if I have enough boxes for all of this," she prattled on. "I guess we can just start with the kitchen and the living room and leave your bedrooms for later."  
John took the cup of tea from her, carefully using his steady right hand as the fingers on his left were beginning to twitch.

'N-no.' He was surprised that Mrs Hudson was able to actually catch his lowly spoken utterance, let alone divine his meaning. _No_ , the flat could not be let to anyone, _no_ , they would not pack anything, _no_ , he was not leaving again, and _no,_ Sherlock could not do this to him.

And suddenly the tough old lady was in pieces, tears streaking her cheeks. But she was smiling at him as well, and when she clung to him, John tried to comfort her while his own heart seemed to make itself as small as possible in his chest, curling up as if preparing for a long hibernation.

.

All this went through John's mind but never left his mouth, so he was aware that Ella might have been waiting quite some time for him to say anything once more, when she spoke.

"You seriously intend to stick with this decision, John?" Ella shook her head disbelievingly. "I could already tell this was a bad idea last time, after you had been back to your old flat for only one day. But have you recently taken a look at yourself?"

Some snide remarks were on the tip of his tongue but he was too tired to pick a fight with his therapist. "This is not just about me," he offered by way of explanation. Although Ella might not be able to make much of this since he had never filled her in on Mrs Hudson – or anything much, really.

"You are right. It is not." Ella said decisively. "So why don't you get your head out of your arse, Dr Watson? And put a stop to this self-imposed punishment, locking yourself away from everything? For something that was _not_ your fault?"


	6. Turning Traitor

No, maybe not his fault. But that was not why he felt the need to do penance at all: Ella was barking up the wrong tree there.

It was _betrayal_ that hung around John's neck like a millstone. And his sense of guilt had him standing - for the first time in more than three months - at _that_ window again; the living room window on the right, from which he had observed the street below on that fateful last evening they had spent in their flat. John felt himself trembling at hearing a conversation long past. It was like living on some kind of ghost train where the same horrid, cruel things were screamed and cried and... and whispered over and over again.

_That's why you're so upset. You can't even entertain the possibility that they might be right. You're afraid that you've been taken in as well._

He had not been all that angry in the situation itself, when Sherlock had actually doubted John's loyalty, claiming that he had been taken in by Moriarty's lies like all the others. Back then, John had known exactly how to read that question, as eloquent proof of just how shocked and deeply unhappy his best friend had been in that moment when the dreadful turn events were about to take had become clear.  
There was just no way Sherlock would ever have voiced such a pathetic plea for reassurance otherwise – which was exactly what his suggestion that John doubted him had been. John was able to see through it right away... Then.

After all that had transpired afterwards, however, the scene haunted him like few things he had seen and lived through in his life did. There were two sides to it, that he kept seeing, like two sides of a spinning coin. And it made him desperately disoriented.

On the one hand, he wondered – and could never know for sure now that Sherlock was dead – if Sherlock had not seriously become unsure of John's... hell, here he was again. He stumbled over the right word here each time, but he could not tackle that problem yet, so he'd call it "loyalty". Maybe he had actually begun to believe that John had been successfully manipulated into doubting absolutely fucking _everything_ he and Sherlock had had. Maybe he had **died** believing that John was no more loyal, no better, no _closer_ to him than all the rest of those who had so casually turned against him – most of them without any prompting from Moriarty. And did not Sherlock's last words support this awful view? Or were they proof of the opposite?

Try as he might – and no, the truth was, he did not try, never had -, John still did **not** believe a single word Sherlock had said to him during that last call, preposterously spending his last moments trying to feed John the lie as well!

He had told no one about this, by the way. Not a single word.

On the other hand, his own memories and feelings were in such confusion, reaching such deep lows, that more and more frequently, there were moments in which he was beginning to wonder if there had not been a spark of doubt in him, after all. Would a genius like Sherlock have asked him a question like that if he had not already had proof that John was lost to the other side? He surely had seen something in him, a change, a telling look: something that had shown him John was taken in by the lies that were ripping Sherlock's life apart by the second.

Yes. John trusted Sherlock's judgement, always had. And that was why on this side of the coin he was seeing himself as a traitor, someone who had stopped believing. And the words "only friend," uttered by Sherlock once, fired his self-hatred up so much that it hurt to breathe whenever he contemplated this side of the coin for too long.

He was going mad with the bone-deep pain of it.

* * *

"Good to see you, John." Ella stepped aside to allow him into her study and treatment room, eyeing him warily, but her smile seemed relieved as though she had not been sure that she would see him again.

John knew she had no reason to fret over this. His trips to his therapist were pretty much his only excursions from the flat, and he was completely aware that this was neither normal nor good, but it was better than not leaving 221B at all.

He had resolved to tell her something today. Though not about his private pity party; she had made it clear last time that this was the last thing he should be doing... But he thought that maybe he could tell her a bit about the others whose presence he was able to tolerate every now and then. And it would surely gladden her psychiatrist's heart to have him talk about another fucked-up relationship, he thought grimly.

Harry had been by surprisingly quickly – only two days after his disappearance from her house-, and he told Ella about her visit.

'You could have mentioned you were leaving,' Harry accused half-heartedly. John knew they used to look a lot alike as children, but age had sketched out the differences. During her worst years, Harry had looked about fifteen years older than him instead of only two, but he had made up lost ground over the last three months.

He could have pointed out that they both preferred it this way. Or that he had not planned to stay in Baker Street, at all, but had been stuck the second Mrs Hudson had dragged him behind that door once again. But as he had done for more than a month of sharing her house, he simply said nothing to her at all, merely shrugged.

John followed Ella's movements as she took a few notes at this. _Gotcha_ , he thought. She was going to be a lot more interested in his family background now, if he got lucky. _Very mature, John, trying to fool your therapist. If she doesn't pick up on it, fire her._ Sherlock's acid comment rang through his mind.

Harry had gazed at him like he was a riddle when he stayed silent. John had looked away, unable to stand the intensity of her scrutiny that reminded him too much of... He sipped his tea.

'It's just not healthy,' she finally said. She and Ella would get along just fine.

'N-not telling you?' he retorted lamely. It had been an established routine between them while he was staying at her place. Harry waiting, watching... maybe even _hoping_ for him to finally break. To cry. To really mourn and let all that grief spill out.

It was what normal, real people did to get over the loss of someone important, wasn't it? It was necessary for healing. But John had not cried to this day. A stray tear, in the first weeks after the fall. Then sobs, dry and heaving, sometimes during the sessions with Ella.

He could not even cry for his best friend.

"And why do you think that is, John?"

He was truly embarrassed that he had voiced these last thoughts out loud, obviously. He was so used to being alone that he spoke to himself sometimes without even noticing, but he should still be able to keep his thoughts to himself when in company... He had not meant for Ella to hear that last part.

_Because I'm feeling so damned guilty_ , he thought. He knew that Ella would give him hell for his pursuit of self-pity. It was not all about him: those had been her words, hadn't they?

But he felt guilty two times over – and that was **Ella's** doing. Yes, he felt, she had taken advantage of his raw, fresh grief and forced him into saying those words, back in their first appointment. And he had said them, if only once.

He had felt an arch-traitor ever since.

"Why can't you, John?" she insisted.

_Because I don't deserve the release of being able to cry for him_ , he replied – silently this time.


	7. The Lizard Brain

"Good to see you, John." Ella led him to their customary seats. "You look quite..."

"Calm?" John supplied, kicking himself instantly for falling for the oldest trick in the book.

Ella's forehead wrinkled. " _Gaunt_ was what I had in mind, to be honest."

John looked at his hands, taking one slow breath after another. He supposed Ella's assessment was correct because he could not remember eating anything really, apart from Mrs Hudson's occasional pieces of cake and her biscuits. Considering, he now noticed the more marked blue lines of veins running over the back of his hands and the tendons moving beneath his skin. Odd, that he should not have seen it before. _Oh, you did see..._ Oh, shut up, John thought.

"I w-was a bit ill," he lied. The truth was, that he felt like he had lost his sense of time, which made keeping regular hours for eating or anything else pretty much impossible. The last weeks back in their flat had gone by incredibly slowly and in a rush at the same time. Though the rushing did not happen in the right places, always...

"It would seem so." Ella scribbled. She did not believe a word he told her. _Well, why should she?_ "So, what have you been doing, John? Tell me about your routines."

He stuttered through a few meaningless commonplace remarks. The truth was that John spent his days moving through the debris of a past life. Until this day he had not picked up a single item from its place. He just could not. All he had made himself do so far was _touching_. Letting his fingertips slide over surfaces that were slowly gathering a noticeable layer of dust.

For obvious reasons, this made living in the flat very difficult, since Sherlock's belongings were scattered all over the place, but John managed. He spent his days and nights listening and soaking up all the smells, until he left the place where he was alone and hurting, returning at last to where Sherlock and he had been together and comfortable in each other's company.

"So you still haven't packed your dead friend's belongings." Ella picked out the one thing he had been truthful about with telling accuracy. "Wasn't that what you went there for?"

"N-no." It was what everyone else wanted him to do, but he didn't say that. And now he could imagine doing it even less than before because of the way the flat had become his bubble in reality where the feeling of loss was, if not bearable, at least in some way contained. It was a space that allowed him to go into his abysses and vanish into his own head without it seeming out of place, maybe because that flat had seen a much madder man before him. John felt the sudden urge to giggle but covered it up by coughing. _Maybe she'll even buy your sick-story if you take up acting now_ , he heard the voice mock him.

"It will stay as it is, and I will stay as well."

When he was up in his bedroom, he could – sometimes – even hear Sherlock moving about, his fluttering movements of sudden action, and could fool himself into believing that his friend had just left to follow some lead. Would be back at some unexpected moment, and John was still hoping that one morning he'd find Sherlock meditating on the sofa as if nothing had happened. Hell, he'd even be happy if the man woke him by giving the wall another well-deserved shooting.

And he was also able to smell that slight note of whatever used to permeate Sherlock's clothing. A mixture of chemicals he used in his experiments, detergents and antibacterial soaps that were used at Bart's, and something undefinable John had come to assume was simply the smell that every human being carried with them and that went unnoticed most of the time unless somebody's smell appealed to you or caused you revulsion. As a doctor John knew that this instinctive reaction to another human being was still largely unexplained by biochemistry and psychology – was it just pheromones guiding our actions according to genetic matchmaking?

But why then would very similar rules be at work among people of the same gender? Imperceptible data determining our 'choice' of friends, lovers, enemies... What information exactly did we get slipped this way? And should we feel manipulated? Yes, he was digressing, but John could not help but wonder what happened in those lizard parts of the human brain, because he had recently discovered how strongly he reacted to smells. (Though this was nothing new in him, he had realised, noticing only now that what he remembered most vividly about Afghanistan was actually the smells of burning tyres, as well.)

"John? John, what is it about the flat and those things that you believe you need to protect?"

"Right: forgive me that I'm not able to throw my best friend's belongings away just like that!" The anger at Ella's words bubbled up from somewhere. He would have liked to slap her for damning, negating his only consolation like that.

"John, it's only... things. You don't need them to keep what was _really_ important about him."

"Is." _Mistake._

"That is it, isn't it? It's present tense for you. Do you still not see how bad living there is for you? You build a world of your own, one that you may think is helping you but it does not help you _recover_. It will only help you to lose yourself in there."

The worst thing was, John could not deny the truth of her analysis.

After three weeks back at the flat he had finally found the courage to slip into Sherlock's bedroom, feeling utterly foolish at first. The clutter matched the one present in the living room the only difference being that here it was mostly clothes littering floor, chair and bed. And then he'd drawn a shaky breath – and his eyes had closed of their own accord.

Time seemed to vanish, and he sank back on the large bed, overwhelmed by the feeling of someone being present who would never inhabit this room again.

John felt the ugly tremor in his hand creep up his lower arm and sighed wearily. "Maybe you are right," he conceded.

Weird how someone so keen on appearing ethereal and aloof could elicit so physical a reaction, even after... Weirder still, how someone whose physical appearance seemed to be as much part of their personality as Sherlock's had always seemed strangely unphysical at the same time.

Sherlock had actually, pretty early on in their acquaintance, struck John as one of the most un-physical people he had ever met – and he did not count himself among those who sought physical contact actively or particularly frequently. Sherlock, though, took this to a totally different level. He rarely let himself be touched and hardly ever offered so much as a handshake (unless he hoped to gather information about someone that way, obviously). Recounting those two past years, John reached the conclusion that he might actually be able to count each and every instance of physical contact – almost every single one necessitated by some sort of serious event or other.

Well, if you thought of your own body as transport for an intellect, then this attitude might make sense... And Sherlock was serious about this, as was thoroughly proven by the way he was able to starve himself, or deprive himself of sleep if necessary. This completely maniacal behaviour was the only convincing sign of Sherlock's purported 'sociopathy' that John had ever noticed in him. Being an incredibly rude dick did _not_ equal sociopath in John's book.

Maybe that was something Ella could help him with; she was a psychologist after all. But John was sure beyond a doubt that that had just been Sherlock's lovely way of telling people to fuck off and mind their own business instead of even attempting to get to know or understand him...(Funny, had he ever tried to make John believe that diagnosis? He could not remember.) After all, he knew that Sherlock _could_ act differently. John would never forget Sherlock kissing Molly that Christmas evening. Or how he could sometimes act around good old Mrs Hudson. Though, maybe... Maybe it was something that had grown gradually over time, changed...

So, Sherlock was not anti-physical, just... un-physical by nature, John decided. You only had to remember his – non-existent – response to naked Irene Adler. John still couldn't suppress a smile whenever thinking about _that_. It also brought back a clear-cut memory of an almost naked Sherlock standing in Buckingham Palace with no modesty to speak of.

And then, there was that evening, standing out from his memory. Again, sheer necessity had made them run hand in hand, like children taking off, encouraging each other to keep going by the strength in their linked hands. Another thing imprinted on John's mind and filling it whenever he looked at his naked palm for too long these days. Sherlock had instigated it, had asked – well all right, _ordered_ – him to take hold of his hand and John desperately wanted to believe that his best friend, too, had felt stronger, better, for it and had been aware of the warmth and energy they shared. He would never know now.

But could Sherlock have jumped, _left_ him like that if he had felt it?

The disappointment of opening his eyes after some indeterminable length of time (the sun had set by then, so it must have been more than two hours) and not seeing him as well was like a slap but John, from vast experience, had seen this one coming. Didn't do much to soothe his fluttering nerves though which leapt with hope every time he opened a door in the flat, turned a corner or opened his eyes in the morning.

"John, I understand that you have seen his body."

And it was like he had run against a wall at full speed. Her words conjuring up that last image John would ever have of Sherlock as precisely and clearly before his eyes as if she had put up a poster.

"Wh-what the f-" he made himself stop there but it was a close call. Maybe he should be cancelling the treatment anyway.

"The way you are trying to anchor him in reality, how you seek physical... connection so to speak. It mostly occurs in people who have never seen the remains of the deceased. You see, it's often a factor in not _truly_ accepting someone's death."

"I-I... I saw him." John forced out, his voice like sand.

"So you know." Ella waited in vain for him to acknowledge this.

Four months gone. A full third of a year.


	8. Others: Mycroft

Next month, John was too angry to be bothered to keep his appointment with Ella. His mind seemed to seethe with fury. Not that this was anything new, was it? But John knew that he had been getting calmer, more collected, a bit less frayed around the edges compared to those first weeks. And now he was feeling like he was coming apart at the seams for good, and it gave his fury a new quality.

The morning before he had woken to a surprising (if you did no longer care much for seasons and time passing), bright spring sun shining warm on his face. Maybe he should go out, John thought suddenly, catch a bit of air in the hope that Ella would not find his complexion all that worrisome the next day.

Well, he was beginning to find Ella worrisome, John found himself thinking. He was so very glad that, since he was living in their flat again, he was not _constantly_ seeing his best friend's dying moments anymore, only to have Ella bring those very images up each and every time. He principally accepted that trauma therapy works with confrontation but... _But you are too sentimental to_ _ **want**_ _to get over this._ Sherlock's derisive comment gave him pause. That was not true.

But the only trauma therapy that had ever worked for him had been _Sherlock_. And he was not around this time to make him get over this, so sod his clever comments.

John turned his head to stare at the gun lying on his nightstand and felt the certainty grow that he needed to find a way to get back into service. The thought had presented itself first after the treatment in March. Maybe Ella was right and he was becoming a self-pitying egotistic hermit. Maybe it was time to return to what he knew he was good at. Other than being Sherlock's... best friend? Blogger? He frowned. Well, whatever.

 _You're missing the war_ , Mycroft had told him once, such a long time ago, and the man had been right then. So if Sherlock wasn't here anymore to let him walk the battlefields of London with him, John would have to find his way back to the real battlefields where he could still be of use to someone.

With these rather invigorating thoughts, John got up – and his leg gave out.

John fell sideways, his left foot sliding on the rug, and his hip and elbow crashed painfully onto the floor. Unable to process what had just happened, he stayed down and stared at his perfectly healthy, betraying leg. Which he had been so proud of keeping functioning since Sherlock was gone.

God, how he _hated_ all of this.

And it was the first time that John was really utterly tired of living, and it scared the hell out of him.

.

So John did not, as he usually did, leave Baker Street at 10 the next morning. He sat the whole day in his chair, dressed for going out, and stared at the old cane he had hurled across the room in a fit of temper. A temper born of fear. What on earth was he going to do now?

It took the odd kind of network that was, unbeknownst to John, trying to keep him safe a little over six hours to figure out how to answer his break in routine. And it was 7 o'clock that Baker Street saw an illustrious visitor return for the first time in many months.

"Good evening, John."

"Mycroft." John acknowledged without enthusiasm. Although Mycroft was still one of the few people he would not kick out of their flat straight away, John found that he was still livid with Mycroft for failing Sherlock (just as he himself had). The man who was the British government unable to save his little brother? John just couldn't get his head around it. It was so easy to believe that there was some hidden agenda behind it all, but seriously entertaining the idea that the older Holmes would sacrifice Sherlock, John knew, was gross. Gross nonsense. He supposed he should have had a decent talk with the older Holmes at some time but he had not felt up to it so far. Didn't still.

"Wh- Why are you here?"

"Well, since you don't deign to answer your landline _or_ your mobile, you did not really leave me much of a choice, did you, John?"

John vaguely remembered disconnecting their telephone the day after Sherlock's... afterwards, and before the funeral when it had not stopped ringing. Calls from the press he had not known how to get rid of other than removing the phone itself. Thinking about it now, he realised that he had never plugged it back in.

Nor had he charged his mobile.

He had not even done it on purpose but Mycroft did not need to know that, did he?

"And you c-could not deduce anything from those fa... facts?" John was working very hard by now to keep his face empty, feeling red creep up his cheeks.

Mycroft gave him a stony stare. "I took it to mean you wished for some privacy and acted accordingly."

"Oh, r-really? It's not like- like I haven't noticed your car following me around to Ella's. Or any-" It dawned on him then. "Ah, I see. You're here to ch-check that I haven't done the deed. Has Ella reported back to you that I didn't turn up in time? Or was it your agents setting off the alarm for my breaking the routine?"

"There's no need to get worked up, John."

"If you say so." John felt that need very much, actually; he wanted to shake Mycroft, to get some reaction that was genuine. But after the funeral he should probably have known better. "You still haven't answered my question," John pointed out.

Mycroft was staring at his hair which John knew had gone almost completely grey. "You look awful, John."

"Well, you _don't_." He made it sound every bit as accusing as he meant it to be.

 

"May I sit?" Mycroft made to lower himself onto the chair opposite John's.

"Don't," he snarled, regretting it immediately.

With a raised eyebrow Mycroft repaired to the sofa, crossing his left leg tidily over the right one and leaning the inevitable umbrella carefully against the armrest. His eyes never left John's face.

"All right, come on. P- poke fun at me, I know you want to," he finally forced out. It was obvious what Sherlock would have said to him in this situation; something scathing about displaced shows of sentiment or some such.

"No, I don't."

"You do. You've always found my loyalty so very ridiculous," John stated acidly.

"I haven't in a long time." Mycroft looked away from John's face for the first time, and it felt like a heavy weight had been removed from him. It was hard to stand that searching gaze knowing just _how_ much he knew Mycroft was able to see.

"And may I remind you that it was also I who asked you to look after... Sherlock."

John was sure Mycroft had not meant to make that little pause. And John realised that he would forgive him eventually because this tiny bit of hesitation told him more about the man's state of mind than he was supposed to know.

There had been times when John felt that Mycroft was far more enigmatic than Sherlock ever was. Sometimes, John had almost liked the man. And then had come a time when he found he could hate him with a passion, for Mycroft had allowed himself too many slips during the Irene Adler case, but mostly during that whole business with Moriarty which had led up to... all this.

Yet, he had to acknowledge now that, despite his best efforts, he could not hate Sherlock's brother because he saw the real, deep sadness the man was covertly watching him with right then. It was not what he would have expected between 'normal' brothers (though he felt not too entitled to judge from his own grimy familial background) but he knew for sure that Mycroft _was_ sad and that had to count for something.

Though the man was surreptitious and efficient about his scrutiny of his surroundings, John did not doubt that Mycroft had long since observed that the flat was virtually unchanged since he'd last visited, months and months ago, and deduced most of what had happened within these walls. John could tell that he was debating whether or not to call him out on it.

The silence stretched out between them, and John started to wonder if Mycroft had lost himself in some sort of reverie after his revealing last statement.

John, for his part, felt no desire to start talking any time soon, glad to not have to highlight his stutter against the horribly posh tone of the elder Holmes. The _only_ Holmes now... he corrected. John felt the pain taking over again.

Mycroft must have noticed, because he eventually spoke up.

"So, how is your therapist doing this time?" John had to admire Mycroft for his sense of humour and his ability to not even twitch at this ridiculous question.

"You tell me."

Mycroft's face grew even more sombre as he allowed himself to assess John thoroughly. "Not better than the last time, obviously."

"It's not her fault, probably. These therapies just don't work for me."

Staring thoughtfully at the cane that had skidded under the table, Mycroft agreed. "Yes. I can see that."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> By the way, the companion piece from Sherlock's POV will be incredibly faster in writing, if I get feedback on this story ;)


	9. Apocalypse and Revelation

"I know now. I finally understand!" John declared by way of greeting when Ella opened her door for him.

"John, calm down." She led him into the room, taking in his painful walk on the cane, and it seemed to John that something was closing in her face. He was too excited to care much, though.

"I've g-got to tell you something."

"That's good, then."

John settled in her patient's chair and tried to organise his thoughts.

* * *

 

In a lot of ways, the dreams he'd been having since _that_ day were what puzzled and haunted John the most. After his time in Afghanistan, the horrors of the war had been a constant in his sleeping hours. Violent firefights and detonating tank mines and grenades – resulting in his comrades, the enemy and little children lying broken on the ground – replayed in his head more or less every night. Those horrors of war had not happened on a daily basis, but they had happened again and again and _again_. And, for John, the feeling of utter helplessness did not lessen with repetition. As a soldier, he would say 'unfortunately,' but as a doctor, John understood that he had to be grateful that his mind was not becoming so blunt that he could no longer care about the loss of life. He would have had to give up his profession if he had ever found that he could not cry for the dead friend or the Afghan child anymore.

Maybe that was why not being able to let his grief out affected him so badly and was eating at him from the inside this much.

Although he would most likely never admit it he _had_ cried himself to sleep quite regularly during the war, and though most people would surely see it as a weakness, John had found that it was an emotional outlet he needed to be better at what he did, to balance his feeling of being absolutely powerless against all the death around him. At least he did not let the dead go unmourned... And here he was, letting his best friend go without giving him even that much.

Anyway, from this experience (and the war had not been his first confrontation with grief either), John had unquestioningly assumed – feared with a passion to be honest – he'd be tortured by a million different versions of Sherlock's death, his terrible flailing plunge, their horrible last words, in his sleep.

What he'd got was, on some level, worse though.

In his sleep, all he felt was the same sickening loneliness he knew so well, but he never saw Sherlock there. He never saw anybody in his dreams anymore. He stood in an empty street before an empty hospital, or he kneeled on the ice cold tarmac of the roof, all alone, like in some post-apocalyptic vision.

So his dreams were turning into a sort of doubtful refuge, being pretty much the only place where he did **not** have to face his best friend's dying moments. The loneliness, though, was so overwhelming at times that he almost wished for the horror of his memories to keep him company.

It was not only the people that were missing in his dreams, but the sounds were gone, as well. He moved around without making any noise, no wind was blowing past his ears, no bird crying. Maybe he was haunting the place as a ghost...

John wondered idly if the roof actually looked the way he kept seeing it night after night. Not even in his student days at the hospital had he ever been up there. The truth being that John was not particularly fond of heights, he had never ventured up there like he knew some of his colleagues had. So was he making all those little details up, the kind and colour of the door? The antennae and ventilation shafts springing from the building? The view over the city?

It was always more or less the same dream. Nothing happened apart from his staring for what felt like hours down onto the pavement where he knew Sherlock had hit the concrete. His head in a dark red puddle.

Last night all that had changed.

He had stepped up onto that knee-high wall surrounding the flat roof – and seen Sherlock. A black cab was pulling up and a man in a long dark overcoat stepped onto the street, a mobile pressed to his ear. John was not even astonished about this sudden change in the dream; he simply watched the scene for a moment and let his gaze wander. It was passing over the office buildings and associated medical departments in the surrounding buildings, when a glaring reflection of some glass pane or mirror made him squint for a moment.

He wondered idly what might have happened if it had indeed been _him_ up here, Sherlock down there, their roles reversed. What would Sherlock have been like if John had taken his own life before his eyes?

In a way it was surprising, wasn't it, that Moriarty had not thought of something like this? It would have taken him even closer to his real aim, wouldn't it?

That was the moment, John suddenly knew.

Realisation struck him like the bullet once had, aimed at his heart; it went straight into his chest without causing immediate death, embedding itself so deep within his flesh that the pain was like a live burning entity: The killers had still been there. And it was _not_ Sherlock they'd been assigned to take out, as they had figured out some time before, though without getting the reasons right, or the implications.

John surfaced from this dream with a cry of pain and a deep ache in his heart.

* * *

John told Ella about his revelation now, a part of him incredibly relieved that he had found _some_ underlying – if not satisfactory – explanation for what Sherlock had done.

"I know now. I s-see what happened," John told her once again. "There must... must have been some threat." He went on, explaining how Moriarty had been dead by then, but that as long as they'd been up against him, the man had never been one to work alone. "Moriarty's men would have shot someone, or maybe he had planted bombs again, I don't know. _That_ is why he did it, to save-"

And while he was saying this, the truth unfolding in him struck him silent.

Moriarty had played Sherlock like nobody else ever had, because, as much as John liked to deny it, Moriarty _had_ understood Sherlock in a way no one else could. It had been clear since that night at the pool that Moriarty intended to make John part of his crusade against Sherlock. And hadn't John handed him the perfect ammunition by showing oh-so-clearly his willingness to give his own life to save Sherlock's?

But Sherlock had not been much better, had he? He had _not_ run. And he had stared at John in such an utterly astonished, unguarded way, for a heartbeat, that Moriarty would have needed to be much more of fool than even Sherlock was to _not_ understand the emotions behind it.

John had known from that second on that Moriarty, for all his derangedness and plain madness, was actually far better than Sherlock at deciphering human emotions. He had exploited that new-found or newly-confirmed knowledge right away, and called Sherlock out on it.

God, how could it have taken him half a year to see it?

Moriarty had _told_ them John was going to play his part in Moriarty's 'game'. And he had. Perfectly.

"He did it to save me..." John whispered. "A-are you listening to me? He was _forced_ to... to jump."

Ella was still taking notes. John could see in her face that something was wrong. She did not even glance at him after his – to this date – longest speech in their treatment sessions. Finally, she raised her eyes, however, and John was utterly dismayed to read nothing but seriousness and pity there.

"You don't realise what you're doing, John, do you? Your subconscious has found yet another way to try and take away the pointlessness of your friend's suicide. _Plus,_ it's giving you the perfect excuse to continue beating yourself up about it for the rest of your life! So you tell yourself he did it for some noble, selfless reason – while chances are, he was just at the end of his rope, being a fraud, a killer probably - and that reason is your life, of all things? So again it's _your_ fault. How very sophisticated. And how convenient."

"Convenient?" His voice sounded shrill to his own ears.

"John, you're repeating the loop, you're keeping yourself in limbo, don't you see?" Ella's face was animated. "Your world will keep turning around him for the rest of your life if you don't stop this, always finding new ways of interweaving your past with what is _now_ , John."

"I c-can tell the difference be- between the past and the present, you know."

"But you don't allow yourself to let the past lie. You still haven't said what lies at the heart of this. You still don't accept."

"What the fuck do you want me to say?" he spit out violently.

Ella did not recoil, staring at him levelly. "That's always been your strategy, not telling, hasn't it? Was that what your father told you to do when he had beaten you or your mother?"

John froze. "I'm leaving now."

"It's your choice, John."

"It's obvious you don't want to understand what really happened!" he shouted, not even noticing that for once there was no stutter in his speech.

"This is no case, John. This is not about _what really happened_. It's about you starting to live again."

* * *

He rummaged for his mobile phone charger for about twenty minutes. And sent the first text in over half a year.

I know now.  
J.W.


	10. To Kill a Friend

**sent 2011-12-20: I know now. – J.W.**

* * *

Once he’d made the mistake of switching on his mobile, an unending string of texts beeped their way into his phone’s inbox.

For some minutes, John stared at the small screen, unsure what to do. Then, he deleted most of them, either for lack of interest, hatred of the sender, or knowing they were hopelessly outdated. Some remained, though, for later inspection.

**received 2011-06-28: I’ve been over, Mrs Hudson says ur at Harry’s. Please call me. – Sarah**

**received 2011-07-20: John, can we talk, please? – G.L.**

**received 2011-08-17: John, Mrs H tells me you’re coping. May I visit? – G.L.**

**received 2011-10-13: Are you even reading these? – G.L.**

**received 2011-10-18: Please call, or come by the clinic some time. Are you alright? - Sarah**

**received 2011-11-19: Tell me when you’re ready to talk. – G.L.**

**received 2011-12-20: John? Please. – G.L.**

* * *

Mycroft’s steps were measured as always, but it had taken him less than twenty minutes after John’s text to arrive at Baker Street, which screamed hurriedness nonetheless.

John allowed himself a small smug smile before it was replaced by a furious glare at the man entering the flat now.

“I know what he did.”

Mycroft stood on the threshold, stilling momentarily at John’s words.

“And you have known all along, haven’t you.” It was not really a question. Mycroft Holmes would not have needed six months to get it.

He searched the man’s face, noticing how his eyes twitched oddly for a second before Mycroft settled for his usual unreadable politician’s mien and sat rather abruptly on the sofa like he had forgotten all about his usually elegant moves.

“How could you not tell me, for God’s sake! Didn’t you think I had a right to know?”

“Actually, I-“

“Was it only me they threatened to kill, or was there anyone else on Moriarty’s death list?”

For three full seconds, Mycroft seemed stunned like he understood only now that John had actually figured it out. Always underestimating him.

“It was you, John. He was concerned with keeping you safe.”

“Keeping... God, he knew way before he was up on that roof!” John realised. “That call! He _made_  me leave, s-.”

And his words and thoughts ground to a halt when he suddenly heard Sherlock’s words in the lab replaying in his head, loud and completely lifelike.

 _Alone is what protects me_.

He understood now. Sherlock had not believed John’s protest that friends were what offered protection. And he had been perfectly right, hadn’t he?

Friends were _not_  what protected him; they were what _killed_ him.

John felt the world start spinning. He breathed against the lump and bile in his throat, while Mycroft seemed to regain his footing.

“Yes, it’s quite obvious why I couldn’t tell you that you were the leverage used on my brother, isn’t it.”

“Obvious?” John’s voice came as a broken whisper but he could not bring himself to care. “All the time I’ve believed that he had... That he died thinking I believed Moriarty’s lies. That our... friendship had not meant anything to him... That he had no idea that I... what he...” John found he couldn’t continue, once more trapped by _that word_ trying again to push into his mind.

“John, believe me, you’re his one friend, the one he’ll never give up on.”

Nice to know that he was not the only one having difficulty to stick with the past tense when talking about Sherlock, John thought disjointedly.

* * *

The month was consumed by John clawing his way through the truth of having been instrumental to Sherlock’s death, in about every way he could think of, because the more his bewilderment about Sherlock’s ‘suicide’ receded, now that he had figured out the reasons behind it, the stronger John’s comprehension of being personally, overwhelmingly responsible for it all had grown.

He had killed Sherlock.

Firstly: He had put the idea into Moriarty’s head, allowing Moriarty to see Sherlock’s weakness in the first place.

Secondly: He had prepared the stage, being the one to introduce the public to his genius friend, the very public that turned on their one-time hero like a pack of wolves – and yes, he rationally acknowledged that the rejection by the media had not played an immediate role in driving Sherlock up onto Bart’s, but it still was a backdrop necessary for Moriarty’s highly dramatic scheme to unfold as brilliantly as it had. Oh, he was willing to accept that the rejection of the _public_ was unlikely to have impressed Sherlock much – a fact which had been one of the major reasons John had not been able to get his head around the ‘suicide’ in the first place. But John was still unsure how big a part the reaction of the likes of Donovan and Lestrade, _their_ willingness to turn their backs, and Sherlock’s apparent doubting John – which he still stubbornly refused to believe his best friend had seriously entertained, but which seemed all the more tragic and heart-breaking now that he knew what had been going on – had played in the last stand that Sherlock had decided to fight _alone_ that day. After all, he could have chosen to seek help, or a way out, to entrust someone with the knowledge, the reasons... Not John, though.  
He shut his memory down before it could replay that last call once again.

Thirdly: He had been the lever to make him jump.

 

Mycroft had been right: if he had known immediately, he might have done something incredibly stupid in that first wave of grief. He only wished he could be sure he wouldn’t still.

After ten days of locking himself in the flat he caught himself idly speculating if he could have stopped Sherlock from taking that step if he had simply drawn his gun and shot himself down on that street. It would not have made that much difference to him from the state he was in now, but his best friend might have stayed alive...

John was well aware that he was headed a dangerous road; he had seen the great “What ifs” consume more than one comrade and knew how this ended. An indefinite stay in some asylum was the best outcome.

Still, John could not stop his spiralling thoughts, spiralling as in ever going round, never reaching any result, aware that he did not have enough data to _ever_ find out, but unable to stop the dance in his head.

The crucial point was, John felt he did not deserve any such sacrifice.

And if he ever had, he did not now, after what he had allowed to happen. How had he not understood what was going on _that day_? How could he have been so incredibly blind? Let himself be sent away like the pet to which Moriarty enjoyed comparing him so much...

Yes, if John had looked closer, close enough, he _could_ have _deduced_ somehow that Sherlock was about to risk and give his life for the sake of being in the right about something.

It had never, ever crossed his mind though that Sherlock would do it for _him_.

Even if he accepted Mycroft’s words as the truth and not something mainly said to comfort him, had Sherlock done it actually out of... friendship? That he had problems really seeing Sherlock _kill_ himself for John only served to deepen John’s self-hatred, because how could he doubt this if Sherlock was dead and he himself was still here? The uncertainty was eating him alive.

Or for the satisfaction of proving his will was stronger than Moriarty’s?

But hadn’t he lost by admitting he cared about people too much to let another die if he could prevent it? Or had he won since Moriarty had not had the opportunity to burn his heart out of him as was his declared aim?

The crux was John had never really understood the rules of the game, or of the final problem.

 

Anyway, no matter what Sherlock’s reasoning and vindications might have been, John should have been aware that there was some addictive part of Sherlock from the time they met, seeing how he had almost taken the possibly lethal pill for no other reason than the knowledge of having been right or wrong. Now he had taken a lethal step to win a game. Only this time John had _not_ saved him from himself, which was the only thing that gave him any right to call himself Sherlock’s friend, really. He tried his best to keep him safe.

After one month of dissecting all the ways in which he had killed his best friend, John felt dead tired.

The only conclusion he had been able to reach eventually was that he had to come up with a plan, and fast, because Ella was right, he would not last long in this state. He hated her for her hurtful remarks, but after all she was not supposed to befriend him, but help him heal.

The plan was simple: He needed her to rid him of that damned psychosomatic limp first. He had to get through his therapy if he wanted to have any chance of passing the army’s tests, as well. Once back in some war, there was no knowing what might or might not happen to him.

So, he was trying to behave like a good boy from now on and do as Ella told him. Accept that she knew best. _You didn’t even accept that_ I _knew best!_ he heard the voice sneering. True, but beside the point.

John had extraordinary self-control if his life depended on it. And this _had_ turned into a fight for self-preservation. He was not going to survive this new spiral of self-loathing, he would not make it through the next year in this state of mind, so it was a matter of survival really to either complete his therapy successfully – or pretend well enough to fool himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, I have my exceptional beta Bee to thank for going through this and correcting my attempts at English writing. This story, at least, will not be troubling you much longer...


	11. Supposed To

On the taxi ride to Ella’s practice with his ‘plan’ firmly in mind, John felt a sort of confidence inside of him growing that he might actually be able do it; could fool himself well enough to fool Ella, as well. He only needed to blot out the weariness, stop himself thinking about _everything_ he had realised over that last month and focus on going on ( _What for?_ He quenched the niggling voice that was not Sherlock’s this time). And forget about the new dream of last night, as well.

* * *

“John, what have you been doing?” Ella seemed shocked by his appearance, and John supposed that the last month had taken its toll. Possibly he should have considered eating and sleeping a little and getting some air to make convincing her that he was making progress easier.

John made himself tell Ella about turning on his mobile, about reading the texts. She seemed indeed pleased, but still suspicious.

“Do you see that there are... other people who care about you?” she probed. “Let your friends-”

Upset, John interrupted her. “Friends! What if I just want to be left alone-” _Alone is what protects me._ He’d never get that one out of his head again, would he.

“You don’t.”

John hung his head and told himself to calm down. Focus. “You’re right,” he lied, and on a sudden inspiration, added, “I have had visitors, actually.”

“Who?”

“Well, Mrs Hudson from time to time, Harry and... My-Mycroft. Twice!”

Ella regarded him with a raised eyebrow. Sure, that was not an impressive list for more than seven months. But that was not what she took exception to.

“So tell me, John. Did you _invite_ them, or were these people trying to be there for you of their own choice?” She waited patiently for him to answer what was clearly a rhetorical question.

“No. Yes.” He seemed to be back to monosyllables, which was not what he had told himself to aspire to today.

“You need to make some connection to the world again. It’s obvious you are still trying to remove yourself from everything... If you still can’t imagine talking to one of your friends, then maybe, as a first step, you should consider continuing your blog.“

“Are you _mad_?” The words were out as he thought them. So much for his resolutions... But he honestly could not fathom how she could expect him to return to the worst fucking idea she had ever had.

But he couldn’t tell her that, could he, since he had resolved to make her believe that he had stopped blaming himself. Although he knew, as she did not, that this was not some delusional self-flagellation but the truth – thanks to Mycroft, he knew at least that he was not losing his marbles.

“John.” Mild reproof. Saying _Haven’t we talked about these stalling mechanisms already?_

John needed to get back on track. “I need to lose the limp. Please.”

“Well. All right. But you know there is no instant cure for that.” Ella seemed slightly taken aback at his apparent change of topic.

“No, but what can I do to make this work faster?”

His therapist regarded him thoughtfully for a little while. “John, you’ve been through denial and guilt. That’s quite a way you’ve gone already. And now, all that’s left...”

“I miss him.”

Ella stared at him, dumb-struck. “Are you aware that this is the _first time_ you’ve told me anything of what you’re feeling?”

John shrugged. It was all that seemed to be left. She was right, he had lived through different phases, and yesterday, he had finally seen that all that was left for him – and would ever be – when he was, one day, past all anger, confusion, hurt and hate, was feeling alone. Because the one he... John swallowed. He would never be there again.

Feeling alone and missing was all that was waiting for him, and the knowledge made him edgy and angry in equal measures. Because he couldn’t figure himself out, really.

Should he miss Sherlock like this even though everyone knew that he was unbearable, impossible, inhuman, and uncaring?

“I guess I miss him more than I’m supposed to.”

“Supposed? What do you mean?” Ella seemed genuinely curious.

“He always said himself he was a sociopath...”

“Then again, he’s dead and can’t _suppose_ anything. Who do you mean, really?”

John told his stupid heart to slow down (it still started to run like a mad thing when someone said out loud that Sherlock was...).

“John, would you please answer my question?”

“He was not a nice person. He was...” Every single time he had been warned about Sherlock rushed through his mind, and he lost the thread of what he was trying to say. “ _You_ don’t seem to get why I miss him so much,” he finally accused.

“John, this is absolutely not about any particular way you are _supposed_ to feel now. I, for my part, am just trying to guide you along the way as grief and loss run their course. But it’s not like you should care what other people think you should feel. About him.”

“Well, I have never cared about that anyway,” he mumbled.

“Good. Because this is only about how _you_ see yourself, your friend, and your relationship.”

John bit his lip to keep from screaming that if he knew those things, he’d probably not need a therapist at all. “I can see very well that you are currently second-guessing, over-analysing your time together, am I right? But that is just another thing that can’t possibly take you forward. The acceptance stage is all about going on aware of and, well... _accepting_ exactly one thing: that there will be no asking questions, nor finding out anything more from that one person that has died. That _that_ record is closed for good. And that is a peaceful thing, too, don’t you think?”

John felt pulled out of reality once again, and into that weird mindscape he had been inhabiting so much lately, by the image Ella’s words created, unbidden. A still body, the very opposite of Sherlock alive; his movement, the sudden surges of energy, the feeling of being breathtakingly alive that had drawn John to him like a moth to the flame.

Peaceful? He had never truly seen him at peace. And he suspected that Sherlock would have found it boring anyway.

Peaceful means dead, John thought.

At least he knew he had not died yet, then.

“John? Do you hear me?”

 _Stay here, no losing yourself in your head anymore!_ “Of course.”

“Tell me, do you think your best friend would have wanted you to ruin your life like this? Do you?” Ella was probably losing her nerve, John thought, because as little as he knew about psychology, making the survivors feel guilty on account of disappointing the deceased seemed like a decidedly odd method of therapy to him.

 

The answer to her question, he knew, had to be no.

During his waking hours, John had become quite good at pushing the overwhelming, frightening, brutal feeling of guilt behind a curtain in his mind by way of focussing on the _one_ other thing he had come to see during that last circuitous and most depressed month of all: namely, the _reason_ for Sherlock’s trying to sell him the lie of being a fake –

The reason that had made Sherlock set aside his massive ego and tell him such an outrageous thing. Even in the face of Moriarty’s plan and the assassin’s assignment, there was no need for him to tell this lie on top of jumping. None at all! He could simply have told him that he didn’t do this of his own free will.

The explanation in itself was more or less mind-boggling: Sherlock must have foreseen, _felt_ ( _that would have rankled, wouldn’t it, Sherlock?_ ) what knowing that Moriarty had been using him to kill Sherlock would do to John, and had been trying to make this easier on him.

The goddamned bastard.

“ _John?_ ”

“No, he wouldn’t have. And I won’t,” he squeezed out.

“Oh, you’ve decided that? I’m happy to hear it.” Ella managed to keep the sarcasm out of her voice but it was a close thing, John thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, my gratitude goes to my dear beta Impractical Beekeeping, who ran a veritable reading-and-correcting-marathon to allow me posting the entirety of this monstrous story, in its completely betaed re-incarnation, as quickly as possible... You're the best!  
> And all potential delays from now on are due to my own laziness alone...


	12. Seeing the Stars

All in all, Ella had not been as happy with him as he had meant her to be, even though John found he had forced himself to say so much this time!

Still disappointed, he arrived at Baker Street and let himself in. _Like telling her you miss me would be such a revelation to her. What did you expect her to do? Throw confetti?_ John gritted his teeth.

Of course Ella had known that before. Still, he had tried... He supposed it was more the fact that he was still focussing all his thoughts on Sherlock (there just was nothing else in him he could find, though he would not admit to it, for obvious reasons) that did not conform to her idea of optimal progress.

But she must have sensed some change in him, for at the end of the session, she told him to tackle ‘task one’. John had been sure she would start on that “Saying what he needed to say” spiel, again but no. She had given him the order, to be completed before their next meeting, to tidy and clean their flat. All of it.

John stepped into their living room and let his eyes roam. God, it _was_ awful. He no longer left everything from _before_ like it was glued to the surface it had happened to be on, but he had not even thought about actually removing anything, either. There was a pile of small plates and a row of cups standing at attention, though much fewer than there would be if Mrs Hudson had not regularly been sneaking in to do a little unobtrusive housekeeping.

 

Honestly, how could the woman (Ella, not Mrs Hudson) talk about accepting and expect him to quietly close Sherlock’s record when he had just found out how _fucking_ little sense the entire man made?! (Ella should count herself lucky that she wasn’t even aware of it!)

Yes, John _had_ thought it absolutely possible that Sherlock’s addictive nature would drive him up on that roof, _would_ make him follow Moriarty’s taunts, because he could not act differently, provided the challenge was intriguing enough. He had good reason, first-hand experience, to know, after all.

But in the end, it had turned out, Sherlock had _not_ done it to satisfy his own needs at all. And apart from feeling guilty (which he didn’t anymore, of course), it made John feel soiled and corrupt for all those thoughts he’d been pondering before he had eventually got it.

With the realisation of Sherlock’s motive – and John was absolutely sure he’d got that right eventually; it had taken him long enough, by God – he was now forced to face the gross ambivalence of Sherlock which had been there all along, puzzling, angering, fascinating John.

 

Ella could keep bandying around her wisdom about the uselessness of asking questions of those who could not answer them, but how on earth was he supposed to get his head around... _anything_?

For example, could you even deduce people like Sherlock did if you actually were “beyond” emotions, caring, feelings yourself? How would he have been able to do, not only the deductions themselves; those were (mostly) logical, but to _interpret_ them? It was one thing to observe the things Sherlock did, but quite another to understand–

No, focus, John! Right, have a go at her task. She’s your therapist, it’s her job to make you whole... _well, whole enough to let yourself be shipped off to some war to get yourself killed, you mean._ John would have hit his fist against this temple but knew by now that it hurt a lot and had no effect on the voice at all. The task.

 

He could do it, he told himself, standing now in the centre of the very dusty, very dirty, very untidy living room, using his cane to poke at a high stack of magazines next to the sofa. He took a slow tour of the flat, dragging his leg along upstairs. John tried to remember when he had last spent a night in his own bedroom, and found he couldn’t say (although he was, secretly, still counting the days since _the day,_ but told no one anymore how much time had passed). Why was it he slept only on the sofa now? Every night when it got too dark to stare at the magazines, he pretended to read, and the only light came from the street lamps, he sat in the gloom of weird shadows and wondered about getting up and going to bed. And every time it was like leaving the flat proper might mean he’d miss... something. Anyway, his rather austere, military way of living was still best conserved up here, and there was nothing to do but sort the clean laundry (yes, not your housekeeper, right; thanks for doing the laundry) into his chest of drawers and wardrobe.

 

He managed to do no more that day. The sheer amount of work, emotional more than anything of course, was too daunting, and once he had sat on the sofa, the therapy session started replaying in his head. Yes, he had admitted to missing Sherlock and it had not been as – hard as John had feared.

But he shuddered at the memory of what _else_ he had shared with Ella, had regretted telling her about Sherlock’s claim to be a sociopath at very the moment it had slipped. (It was very similar to the feeling he’d had when Donovan had given that derisive, sneering chuckle at Sherlock’s ignorance of the solar system because he’d mentioned it in his blog.) Even though he knew that the bad things he had told Ella about Sherlock were true – John knew all of his best friend’s faults, his vices, his sins (or so he thought) – but what about the _other_ side? John was full of nagging doubts and the growing conviction that, no, he did not... (It had first _really_ struck him when Sherlock commented on the stars, completely out of the blue).

And he was still trying to process Ella’s words, most of all her claim that knowing the truth about Sherlock was meaningless and that he should view death as a quiet entity.

If the acceptance phase of grief was about accepting those two suppositions, John was bound to fail...

 

* * *

 

In the course of the next weeks, it came all down to one question he couldn’t seem to escape: Was Sherlock indeed a sociopath? Did – _could_ – a proper sociopath (yes, John had looked it up, done his research, and he had never done it before because when Sherlock had been here he had not given a fucking damn whether the medical diagnosis had fit or not) do, what Sherlock had done? Would he be capable of doing the little things that were so hard for him, that did not come naturally to him at all? Could he say those odd things then and again that seemed so inconsistent with his usual arrogance and contempt?

 

Like occasionally checking with John if he had got off the track of normal human interaction? That small “Not good?” had stuck in some corner of John’s heart ever since that evening in the first week of their partnership.

Like looking at the stars, appreciating their aesthetic value? _Beautiful_. John couldn’t quite believe he’d heard Sherlock say it and hadn’t been able to resist probing. That must have been a first: Sherlock acting disgruntled at being taken for _less_... well fanciful (to avoid the word romantic here) than he was.

Like caring (yes, you did) that he disappointed John by viewing Moriarty’s victims as nothing more than pawns?

Like choosing to stay with John at that pool and rip a bomb from his body with shaking hands? It was the first time that what John was becoming increasingly sure was an incredibly complex mask had slipped completely, if only for a moment.

Like not quite thanking him for saving, or trying to save, his life? Their first encounter with Moriarty, the one they had both survived (though not through any feat of their own) had, John believed, changed the way Sherlock saw him.

Like saying sorry, every once in a while when he knew John expected him to? John knew he had probably not looked less shocked than Molly when Sherlock had kissed her cheek to apologise for his cutting remarks at their Christmas gathering.

Like accepting gifts with good grace (more or less) no matter how tedious and deplorable he thought them? John stared at the pile of unopened boxes containing tie pins, ties and other well meaning, unappreciated signs of gratitude from Sherlock’s numerous clients.

Like panicking as the agents at Irene’s mansion had been one step from shooting John in the head?

Like admitting John was his friend? Yes, all right, this _had_ been a landmark experience for John.

Like lying to him about being a fraud?

Like finally, and most importantly, taking the step to his death to save John.

 

As he first reached this inexorable ending of his ever growing ‘list of doubtful occurrences’, John’s knees buckled under him, and he sank on the ground amidst the debris of their time together, their friendship, of what – as far as he knew – could have lasted for the rest of their lives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Brought to you with invaluable help from the interminably obsessive Impractical Beekeeping ;)


	13. Proper Sociopath

The next session started well, all things considered. John reported in detail about cleaning the flat (No need for her to know that he had not managed to change anything in Sherlock’s room, though, and only had deposited the science equipment from the kitchen, carefully packed into boxes, in one corner. Even less need to tell her that he had not even noticed that he had entered Sherlock’s room for the first time in several weeks when he had his minor breakdown and was unaware of clutching one of Sherlock’s scarves that had been lying across the bed.) and Ella mustered a little smile.

It went straight downhill from there, though.

“I’ve been thinking about our last meeting. You told me your friend claimed to be... a sociopath.” Ella appeared rather loath to accept that diagnosis at face value, John thought and felt instantly relieved. He had feared that having to defend Sherlock against Ella might look too much like he was trying to hold on to him beyond what Ella thought reasonable.

“Actually, I’ve great difficulty seeing how a friendship as close as you obviously feel could have developed in spite of that.”

_And because you don’t get it means... what? That there was no friendship? Or that there was no sociopath?_ And wasn’t that _exactly_ what John had spent the last four weeks wondering about, between the cleaning and tidying? Because nothing fit, made any sense at all.

The now certain knowledge of having completely misjudged his best friend in his last moments, stemming from Sherlock’s real motives had left John with the nagging suspicion that there was more to Sherlock and everything he had done, that there might have been a double meaning behind a good many things regarding Sherlock that John had not seriously questioned before. Had everything not been what it seemed? How much of his friend’s behaviour had been an act, or rather, how much of it had John never understood correctly?

“What are you thinking about, John?” Ella asked rather sharply, sensing that he was about to get lost in his own mind once again.

_Tell her. Tell her so she can help your damned leg, get you back into service._ John fought down the sick feeling in his stomach. He didn’t want to tell her, but not for lack of understanding that she really needed to know, he suddenly realised. He couldn’t bear to _share_ his memories. Share Sherlock. Why would –

“I’m trying to f-figure out what kind of person my be... best friend really was.”

Ella sat straighter, surprised by what was obviously an honest answer. “Go on.”

So John started working through this list that had accumulated, grown, and spread over the last weeks, though he could not have said with absolute certainty, later, what he thought and what he actually said out loud.

 

Point 1. The way that Sherlock rarely seemed to notice John’s absence, even when he was gone for hours, had annoyed him to no end almost from day one. To him, it had been the first indication that there was something seriously weird about his new flatmate, actually. Was it really beyond that man to take notice of his being present or absent, was he _that_ self-centred?

“So, your friend was a rather... unperceptive kind of person, would you say that?” Ella threw in, her eyes narrowed.

John snorted loudly at that. “Not r-really. And that is exactly why I don’t believe he didn’t notice anymore.”

Now John wondered if, from Sherlock’s perspective, this might not have signified something entirely different than the utter disinterest John had seen evidenced in it. What if Sherlock had just come to naturally expect John to be around him so much – or to put it differently, what if he simply did not _want_ John to be anywhere else but by his side (he vividly remembered Sherlock’s rather pleading _Where are you going?_ mere seconds after he had turned his back to sulk, when John made to leave the flat).

So, might blanking out those times when John was gone just have been the easiest way to deal with it instead of... _missing_ him? Ridiculous, wasn’t it? How John wished he could be like Sherlock and do that now, use his brain like a hard drive, erasing and manipulating his own mind to his liking.

“As a doctor, you are aware that no one can handle his memory like that, aren’t you?” Ella commented sharply on his last statement.

“Well...” Unlike her, John had first-hand experience of what basic things his genius friend did not know which threw serious doubt on that tenet (which he would have shared before).

“John! Honestly, you know there’s no way to do that, so stop bending the natural laws around your friend, will you?”

John stared at her, amazed. He wasn’t doing that, was he?

 

Point 2. As a matter of fact, Sherlock was prone to command John’s time. He sent him on countless errands without even consulting his opinion. He ordered him back to Baker Street whenever the mood struck him, even if the sole purpose was writing and sending a goddamned _text_. John had had a hard time believeing what was going on when this had happened the first time, days after Sherlock and he had met.

“That has a strong ring of ‘Heel!’ to it,” Ella muttered.

John knew she was right; she was not the first to think it, even though neither Donovan nor Anderson had ever put it that bluntly. But what if this unquestionably rude and socially unacceptable behaviour had been indicative, yet again, of Sherlock aiming to keep John by his side? Maybe sending a text was simply a really stupid excuse, just to have _any_ reason at all to call John back.

 

Point 3. Sherlock’s way of scaring off (and John told Sherlock’s voice in his head, saying that was _not at all_ what this had been about, to shut up) his dates and girlfriends had always mostly puzzled John. Seriously, someone who, like Sherlock, maintained he was married to his work and took little interest in _anything_ but what could help him solve crimes (not even the Solar System, yes, right) should not even notice what John was doing in his free time, should he? But notice he did, although he stubbornly refused to remember any woman’s name...

“He... he didn’t remember the names of your girlfriends?” Ella inquired, shocked. “I’m sorry, John, but that... it does not sound like he was all that interested in your life, was he?”

“No.” But Ella didn’t understand that his _life_ had happened when he was with Sherlock, when the two of them were somewhere, together, solving riddles and crimes.

So what about Sherlock’s particularly ghastly behaviour towards the women John brought home? Could it be that Sherlock simply did not _want_ John to have a girlfriend? And if that was indeed the case, why should he mind?

“You can’t be serious.”

John looked up, caught out. “No, he really didn’t, I believe, looking back now...”

Ella’s eyes narrowed suspiciously but she said nothing about it anymore.

 

Point 4. From the beginning Sherlock had had an unusual (for him) tendency to impress on John the _reasons_ for his purely rational methods and lack of emotional involvement. He had not noticed (much less understood) this at first, of course; how could he have?

It had started with asking John about _boring_ people’s instinctive reactions and emotional behaviour, “emotional” pronounced with an ever pervasive sneer.

“He ridiculed people’s feelings, you mean?”

“C-c-constantly.” Working through Sherlock’s idiosyncrasies seemed to worsen John’s stammer considerably. There was just too much Sherlock running through his head, and now that he was forced to voice – at least part of – his deliberations, he found he could hardly get a straight sentence (or a word, now) out when everything had sounded so smooth in his head.

“And he asked you to decode how people behave?”

“Made m-me explain. Sometimes tell him if what he did was,” _good,_ he heard his memory echoing, “ac-acceptable.”

During Moriarty’s bombing game though, John now suspected, Sherlock had begun to use him not so much as a moral compass, as striking an image that might be, but to actually seek his approval, wanting, needing him to confirm that his aloofness was indeed the only way to deal with these situations – which had led to their first real row when John refused to accommodate him. John should have seen through Sherlock’s anger, his contemptuous outburst that he was no hero, no matter what John wanted him to be.

He should have got it then, really, that he held _some_ kind of power over the man that maintained he was a sociopath, that he did not care about anyone, much less anyone’s opinion. (It seemed quite ridiculous to John, thinking back now.)

Considering how Irene had played Sherlock – John’s thoughts ended right there, as they always did when he reached this point.

 

Point 5. He wondered if Sherlock’s insisting that he needed an assistant had not been highly suspicious. He had naturally not thought anything weird about it at the time, but knowing Sherlock as he did now... What if taking his new flatmate to the crime scene had been a spur of the moment decision, an attempt at involving him in Sherlock’s life? Had he ever worked with an assistant before? John had never posed the question (too glad to be among the very few let in into Sherlock’s life, he had never dared) as he had learnt very quickly to avoid queries he knew would only be scoffed at or which would only be met with a glare or a quirk of an eyebrow.

“You avoided asking questions you were afraid might anger him, then?”

“W-well, only non case-r...related questions. Asking s-stupid questions about the... case is pretty much my j-j-job description.”

“I can’t believe what you’re telling me here. And you wonder...” Ella stopped herself with a shake of her head. “Sorry. Go on, John.”

 

Point 6. Sherlock was an awful flatmate, and no matter how their relationship might be described, there was no way around the fact that the man was ruthless, oblivious to anyone’s needs or feelings in general.

Then again, John was seeing now and had noticed this even before he had begun this forced-upon, terribly intense scrutiny of his life with Sherlock, that he was not always like that at all. You might even say that he had, at times, been kind of protective of John – at others he had been nothing short of impossible and an egotistical bastard. John was never going to forget that experiment conducted on him during the Hounds case.

Anyway, Sherlock had made it clear from the beginning that there was only so much (meaning _very_ little) time and thought he was willing to invest in human interaction. And proven it a hundred times over by being incredibly rude to just about anyone – but he _had_ been rather remiss in treating John this way, hadn’t he?

The answer to this was difficult, since John could easily come up with several incidents that showed Sherlock did not go out of his way to spare John’s feelings either (being called stupid and an idiot is hardly socially acceptable or nice conversation between friends), but John _believed_ he perceived – and had believed this pretty much from the start – a certain difference in Sherlock’s behaviour toward him compared to other people. He remembered their first evening, on their way to their first crime scene, and Sherlock’s deductions about him. They had been sharp, objective, hurting in their accuracy about Harry’s problems and slightly insolent but – he had not tried to scare John away...

“So, am I getting this right? You’re happy about having been treated less horribly than the rest. Who do you think that man was? What right did he have to treat you disrespectfully _at all_?” Ella’s cutting remark brought John out of this winding train of thoughts.

He did not know what to say. Sherlock was... Sherlock.

“John, I respect your honesty. And I am aware of what letting me see these... episodes of your friend costs you. But all I heard is _What if_. This is exactly what I _didn’t_ want you to do! Asking questions of the dead. Haven’t we been through that? I was asking for _your_ view of your friend, but you keep searching for an underlying “truth.” I repeat: This is not a case, there is no truth for you to discover. It’s all about your emotions and your psychological health.” She drew a little breath. “Because you are the only one left, John.”

She let him suffer through a bad fit of tremors that first gripped his fingers like an icy hand and crept up his entire arm within a minute. _You’re never going to go back to being a soldier,_ it hit him. John fought against the desperation crushing his heart from two directions, like a deadly vise.

“So, tell me, was that a self-diagnosis? Sociopath?” Ella finally ended the silence, dragging John back into the present.

“I-I don’t really know.”

“I was under the impression that you knew pretty much everything about your friend.”

“W-what are you implying? I mean, you d-don’t just go to your friend because he once said ‘I’m a high-functioning sociopath’ and quiz him about the medical diagnosis!” John couldn’t help but add, “Though _you_ probably would!”

Ella seemed unperturbed. “High-functioning, my... Your friend was very specific, at least.”

Her derisive amusement was slowly, truly angering John. “You find all this rather... funny, don’t you? So _you_ tell _me_ something now: What do you think? Was he a sociopath?”

“John,” Ella said quietly, like talking to a particularly dense child. “I haven’t even met the man. All I know is what you tell me about him, and that from the day you met him, I haven’t seen or heard from you for more than eighteen months.”

“What is this? Some sort of pissing contest? Are you offended that he cured my psychosomatic limp when you could not?”

“Honestly John, this is getting ridiculous. You’re apparently too upset to continue this.” John leaned back in his chair and gave her his best officer’s stare. In his opinion he had said more than enough. Now it was Ella’s turn.

“You’re making a saint of the man. If you’re really interested in my professional opinion: Like almost every other person who claims to have some more or less obscure sort of psychological disorder, I think your friend was simply using it as a convenient excuse for behaving... well, the way he wanted to. So, no, from what you’ve told me, he was most likely not a sociopath in any medical sense. He definitely had a narcissistic personality, a neurotic disorder, and a compulsion to control everything and everyone around him. Like you.”

“It was not like that,” John whispered, too deeply shaken by Ella’s words to even feel angry.

“Just so that we get this straight. When you say ‘he was your best friend,’ you are really saying that _you_ were _his_ best friend. From all you’ve told me, I wonder what ever put the idea into your mind that _he_ was your friend, as well.”

“B-but he... he said it himself.” The moment those pathetic words left his mouth, John regretted them. He knew what would happen now. Ella not only pitying him for being unable to let go of a dead friend, but taking him for naive, deluded enough to not even recognise a lie. From a man who had not even made a secret of his disregard for others, treating them like scum.

“He said ‘You are my best friend’?”

John couldn’t stand Ella’s gaze and shook his head.

“I see.”

_And what do you see... what?_ With his face in his hands, John tried to quell the question with regard to this contradicting, floating mass of images, thoughts and ideas that haunted him: What if everything had to be taken at face value? What if the plain reading of Sherlock was the right one? What if he had just been _making up_ all those hidden meanings and feelings? Making up their friendship...

 


	14. Others: Lestrade

When he finally raised his head, despair written all over his face, Ella peered at him with a calculating look in her eyes.

“You were telling the truth about cleaning your flat, weren’t you, John? Because if you haven’t really taken care of your flat this might get very embarrassing.”

John frowned at her, trying to catch her drift.

“Time for task two, John.” He felt a knot of dread growing in the pit of his stomach. “We talked about you letting people into your life again. Making the choice instead of accepting fate’s hand. It’s time.” She held out her hand.

“Wh-what do-” John felt a short deja-vu of his very first meeting, well, confrontation, with Mycroft.

“Your phone, please.”

“No.”

“Oh yes. It’s time to invite a friend.” The way she stressed the last word made John grit his teeth.

So much for making his own choices.

* * *

John could not remember how he got home after that last session. He felt nauseous from the uncertainty Ella had turned into a full blown wildfire of doubt. And from Ella’s hurtful description of the man he could not let go of.

Why had she been telling him those things, condemning a man who could not defend himself? Why was she forcing his raw heart in the tight spot between the need to speak up for his best friend and the absolute certainty that Ella would not understand and draw the wrong conclusions from this?

She wanted to show him something, to drive home a point that she had been trying to make for some time. To her it seemed imperative that John took control of his life again, and damn it, he knew she was right. Therefore his decision to return to the army. He knew now that was never going to happen. He was a wreck, nothing more.

John could see that for Ella things had clicked into (the wrong...) place when he told her about Sherlock and his antics and idiosyncrasies; she was dead convinced now that once he took control of his life again he would... get over things, finally understanding that he had been used and manipulated by Sherlock.

_I haven’t got friends. I’ve only got one._

So, what if Ella was right? What if those words had indeed not meant what he had wanted to hear in them? If Sherlock had just meant that John was the only person who considered Sherlock a friend, not at all the other way round. Or if Sherlock had avoided making a definite statement exactly because he meant John to read something into his words that he could easily deny later on...

After all, Sherlock’s ostensive, aggressive contempt for normal people was maybe the most striking character trait (more obvious clearly than his brilliance of mind) to people who did not know him.

John had wondered about the shell of arrogance around Sherlock shortly after first meeting him. He was not able to imagine such a way of seeing the world without a reason. But the past had never come up between them (as weird as Ella might think that was), and John had not been entirely sure he wanted to know, either.

Sherlock alienated and hurt people by never caring for more than factual data about them. The human beings didn’t seem to exist. But they did. Mycroft did (Sherlock made him maybe the most real by hating him as he did), Mrs Hudson did, to some extent Lestrade, and even Donovan and Anderson did. Sherlock said hurtful things still but John had never taken his arrogant and hurtful comments towards himself at face value.

Had he been simply too stupid to? Had Sherlock marvelled and laughed at the idiot who kept following him around?

He knew he was getting ridiculous. No way... or could it be true? John was so tense with frustration at that point that he almost could see the attraction of shooting the poor wall. He forced himself to his feet and hobbled over to the hole-riddled smiley face, staring at it for minutes. _You gloating bastard._

The doorbell startled him dreadfully.

 

He made the exhausting way downstairs to open the door, as Mrs Hudson had gone out. To Sherlock’s grave, John was fully aware though she never said a word; neither about her own visits, nor about him not accompanying her.

Lestrade’s face turned into a mask of shock as he took in the apparition in the doorway.

“Dear God, John,” he muttered, pulling him into an unexpected – and surely just as unplanned – hug that made John go rigid with indignation.

“Come in,” he croaked, limped down the hallway and worked his way up the steps.

Lestrade looked rather relieved for a heartbeat when they entered the living room, which made John suspect that the DI had expected it to be in as bad a state as John himself. He was suddenly glad that he had actually completed Ella’s first task.

He had chosen Lestrade. Maybe because he had also failed Sherlock. But also for a thing the DI had said once, as well. _Sherlock Holmes is a great man. And I think one day, if we’re very, very lucky, he might even be a good one._ John had given that assessment, the first even slightly positive one he ever heard about Sherlock, a lot of thought lately, eventually figuring that either Lestrade had figured Sherlock out, more than anyone else maybe, or he had been taken in just as much, and was just as much of an idiot, as John was. Which had seemed good enough for him right then.

Yesterday though, with Greg’s visit imminent, he had suddenly realised that knowing that Lestrade thought that way made the betrayal even worse as well. And John suddenly wondered about the wisdom of meeting the man.

 

Lestrade sat gingerly on the sofa, looking distinctly nervous about being in these familiar and yet so profoundly different surroundings. He’s feeling it too, John realised. Absence, and keenly.

Guilt shone through every line of Lestrade’s body, making it impossible for him to keep eye contact for more than a quarter of a second; and suddenly John felt the old anger building up again, washing over all his own guilt and pain and somehow taking the strain away a bit, just a tiny bit, but better than no relief at all.

After a few covert looks around the room and three more futile attempts at fixing his gaze on John, Lestrade’s eyes eventually clung to the rug at their feet. He obviously did not quite know what to say, or he was still trying to pluck up his courage to say what he was here to.

“John... I wanted to... I,” Lestrade stumbled over his words. “I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell you before but you... I mean, I understood that you would not talk to me.” Greg’s eyes were suspiciously bright, but he went on, regardless. “I can’t tell you how much I regret what happened. What I did. What... what I did not do.”

“I hope you do.” John couldn’t help saying it. Couldn’t help saying it like a curse.

He watched with an alarming sense of detachment as the DI started crying silently at his vile comment. A few tears were rolling down his face, and for exactly three seconds, all John seemed to be able to feel was envy.

Then it struck him that not only did Lestrade not know that John had effectively killed Sherlock; no, what John knew was his own responsibility since he had got behind what had led up to Sherlock’s fall, Lestrade still assumed to be his (and all the other traitors’) fault. And John felt ashamed of himself. For letting Greg (and even wanting him to) suffer for what he knew could not be blamed on him. Because he wished so very much there _were_ someone else to blame.

Betrayal was ugly. As a soldier, John despised those who made use of other men – Sherlock in this case – for as long as it served their purposes, only to let them be sacrificed (be it on the altar of public scandal or a battlefield) the moment they deemed that more helpful to their ends. Betrayal, yes, but Greg had had no hand in killing Sherlock, and John knew he should tell him and found he could not do so. Because explaining the truth was too much: he could not make it real by telling people, Sherlock’s death already weighing him down like a millstone as it was.

“I just want you to know that I’ll never forgive myself for doubting him. For betraying him.” Lestrade spoke through the tears after a little while.

“I-I’m sorry, Greg. I sh-“

“Don’t! It’s me who has to be sorry, I know that. I regret those days like nothing else in my life.” He looked rather surprised at his own words. “I will never forgive myself for what I did to him.” He wiped his face carelessly. “And to you,” he added, his voice thick with emotion, while his eyes started flitting nervously over John’s frame again.

“I really don’t kn...know why you all are ex-ex,” John felt red creep up in his cheeks, “exaggerating the matter like this.”

As an attempt at humour it was a sad excuse but it got him a sharp jerk of the head and a moment of eye contact from Lestrade before he chose John’s hand lying on the arm rest to stare at. “We’re not,” he said simply, after a few seconds. “John, you look like-“

“Who cares?” John asked venomously. “What does it matter?”

Confusion at this replaced the pain and tears, as Greg tried to figure out where this was going.

“It would have mattered to him.”

_Oh, really?,_ John bit it back, forcing his mouth shut. He couldn’t let anyone see the great gaping hole that the doubt Ella had sown into his heart so expertly had eaten into his soul.

His mind had started replaying another memory in Sherlock’s voice, one that was so seductively supportive of Ella’s assessment. John had kept hearing it for the last weeks and it often drowned out any remainder of his belief in Sherlock being his friend. Those words, _Why would I need you?,_ uttered dismissively, kept running in a loop now, and the only answer he could give was the same he had given back then.

He would have given anything to know if there was another answer. But he couldn’t seem that needy, not to Lestrade nor anyone else. _Which does not change anything about the fact that you are_ , the voice sneered mercilessly. He couldn’t ask Lestrade, of all people, for reassurance in this. He looked enough like a fool as it was.

 

“Have you seen the papers today?” Greg asked, when it was clear that John was not willing to discuss the topic of his health or lack thereof.

John shook his head, not at all interested in what he guessed might be coming.

Lestrade had obviously expected his response and pulled a rolled-up newspaper from his jacket. “They say it’s all been a mistake.”

John caught a glimpse of a headline: _Loss of a London Genius_ – _The truth about an incredible setup_. “I don’t n-need to read that, you know.”

“No, you’re right. _You_ have always believed he was real.”

“And you haven’t?” John queried. He suspected that Lestrade’s actions were more spineless than sinister.

Lestrade shrugged tiredly. “You’ve never let him down, have been more... protective all along.”

The word sat in the room with them like a fluffy, HUGE thing nobody was sure could not bite someone’s head off. Protective, right. That was him. Doctor Watson, supportive assistant, patient flatmate, protective friend.

He felt a hysterical giggle build in his chest. It was crying, screaming, or laughing.

“You’ve always believed in him, and you always seemed to know what he needed to...”

“Oh shut the fuck up!” John shouted (crying and laughing had really been too much to hope for). Of course, Greg didn’t know that John was the reason for Sherlock’s death, so he could not even guess just how off the mark his words were, but he saw John beginning to shake and drew entirely the wrong conclusions.

“John?” He put his hand on John’s shoulder.

“He was not a nice man, was he?” he demanded suddenly, angrily.

“John?” Greg’s voice was even more muted than before.

“I mean he was a self-centred, egotistical and unfeeling bastard, right? He hated just about everyone. He hurt each and every person no matter how well they meant. He wanted nothing to do with all of us!”

“John...” Confusion made Lestrade repeat his name slowly, but John hardly heard him through the din in his head.

“He used everyone, didn’t he? He used you, that’s for sure. I guess I have been too stupid to see that he only tolerated me-“

Lestrade’s hands were suddenly on both sides of his face, forcing him to let Greg see him. “What on earth are you going on about? You don’t really believe this. Tell me you don’t!”

“I don’t have a fucking clue what to believe anymore,” John spat violently. “All I know is he kept me at arm’s length, and I don’t know a single fucking thing about him – not really – not anything. It could all have been a lie.”

“Where is this coming from?” Lestrade’s face was white with... John couldn’t say, really. The anger at himself, at Ella, and his inability to make sense of anything now were clouding everything, he knew but couldn’t bring himself to care anymore.

“You have always believed in him... like no one else ever has.”

“Yes, I _did_.” He said the words under his breath, but caught Lestrade’s face and knew he’d heard.

It was like something crumbled behind his eyes, they went soft with sudden understanding and John’s heart stumbled and he hoped, for a second, that he might finally be able to cry.

“John, you... you can’t stop believing in him now.” Lestrade was still staring at him like John’s hopeless words had broken something in him. “You can’t! You didn’t doubt him for a second when everyone did, you didn’t buy the stories of him being a fake, why-“

“You ask me why, Greg? Seriously?” He would not listen to this from Lestrade, John thought furiously. “Moriarty got _you_ to doubt him, with nothing but a few petty tricks and an outrageously stupid story about an invented master villain. By playing on your jealousy and your own hope and willingness to see Sherlock brought down. And you had known him for five years!”

The air felt dense and sticky in the silence that fell. “I have not really known him, though,” Lestrade replied, sounding slightly off. “I mean I’ve known for a very long time that he was a genius, I-“

“Have you now,” John interrupted acidly, all the disappointment in the man rising, and the need to lash out for what he felt were admonitions Lestrade had no right to give no longer controllable. “Have the papers convinced you again?”

“John, I knew he was a genius but I was not sure how far I could trust _him_ , do you understand? And _that_ was why I could be manipulated like that.” Greg drew a breath as he seemed to figure something out at that moment. “But it was the other way round for you, wasn’t it? _You_ have always believed in _him_ , not so much in his incredible abilities of deduction... You’re...” He stopped himself. “You are right, I should have known better, but then again... I did not know him at all like you do. Sometimes I wonder if there _was_ much to know before you came along.”  
”What is that supposed to mean?”

Lestrade shifted in his seat. “Before, it was like... like he wasn’t real, you know.”

“No.”

“For God’s sake, John. Don’t you get it? Have you never talked about...” Lestrade’s face cleared suddenly. “Stupid of me, really. He wouldn’t say anything and you know better than to ask, I guess.”

“What do you mean, ‘not real?’”

Lestrade’s gaze turned distant, and he was obviously organising his thoughts. “John, it seems like you are not aware of...,” he trailed off. “I have never seen Sherlock remotely as... balanced as he was with you. He has never before seemed so close to being, well, content might be the best word. He acted like an eccentric person when you were around, not like a maniacal junkie.” Greg clamped his mouth shut. “Sorry, I-“

“Are you talking about drugs or the game?”

Sherlock’s history with drugs had actually come as a massive surprise to John, even though he had known him for less than a week then. It was absolutely unfathomable, still was.

Could you seek absolute control of everything while at the same time letting yourself be ruled by some chemical substance? _You people are ruled by chemical substances all the time, just because it’s hormones with you, doesn’t make it any less objectionable._ John almost smiled at that. Nonetheless, he couldn’t get his head around it: there was just no way this could be conducive to Sherlock’s mental powers, and that seemed to be the only thing that really mattered to him. (But was that actually true? Ella would have seconded the claim for sure.)

“I guess both,” Greg acknowledged. “I’ve always thought Sherlock was the last person on this planet who should take drugs.” A little smile tugged at his mouth at some memory. “Not that he cared much for my opinion.”

The story Greg told him left John for once with something else to focus on, rather than guilt and doubt, though it was too sad and desperate to be a relief in any sense of the word.

“He only stopped this determined self-destruction once he decided he was a consulting detective.”

“And you let him show off at crime scenes?” John guessed.

Greg shot him a strange look, but did not explain it. “He did his deductions, he pestered my officers, he offended absolutely everyone involved – and he solved the case. But it was...”

Lestrade thought for a moment. “He was like a ghost once he had delivered his solution... Like there was no life beyond the puzzles, the riddles, the cases.”

“He must have gone through an awful lot of assistants.”

Greg gave a small sad smile. “There was no one he would work with even twice, before. I don’t claim to have understood the man and I guess you’ve got good reason to doubt my reliability when it comes to friendship and loyalty... but if Sherlock ever had a friend in life it’s you.”

_Yes, if..._ John breathed against the sudden panic in his chest, fighting the urge to question Lestrade’s statement.

“John, would you do me a favour?” Greg asked, getting up. “Don’t doubt him, don’t make yourself do it just because you can’t stand... believing anymore. Please.”


	15. Lost

Dragging himself up the stairs after showing Lestrade to the door in silence, John’s mind replayed the man’s words in a loop and suddenly, something in his mind unhinged. He could almost hear the tiny rivet breaking when he tried to reconcile three people’s ways of seeing the world, or rather Sherlock (and no, that’s not the same, not even to me, so shut up), in his one tired, so very tired, mind.

And this was the thing, because when it came down to it, John simply couldn’t content himself with weighing only his own, Ella’s, and Lestrade’s assessments. The _fourth_ one was the only one that mattered to him. And he was never going to find that one out.

John’s emotions started oscillating, making him dizzy, even more so than when he had first started analysing Sherlock’s behaviour to detect the underlying rationale. And no matter how long he thought, from which side he tried seeing the time they had spent together, however hard he remembered their conversations and Sherlock’s comments, lectures, and explanations... _Friends._ The simple word cut through his confusion, and his heart gave a slow lurch instead of a decent beat. Sherlock’s face swam into his memory, on it that look of complete disdain, and in his voice the essence of scorn at the ridiculous concept. _Friends._

Everything in him was warring. His need to believe in Lestrade’s description, accept his obvious conviction that Sherlock and John’s friendship had been real, to him as much as it once was to John – against his desperate wish to not fall prey to wishful thinking and take Ella’s analysis, her take on things seriously. She was a professional, for God’s sake, she recognised what people themselves could not see or recognise about themselves for a living! So he had to be able to rely on her judgment.

John tried very hard to figure out where all this left him, wading through the mess of all that he had been thinking, reconsidering, re-evaluating in the last nine months.

He could not stop thinking about Ella's allegations, her boring questions. Ella had just been _so sure_. She seemed to have an answer, an explanation to everything (for all that she maintained that she did not judge and that John’s opinion was all that mattered...). How weak had Lestrade’s pleas been compared to that! But there had been that honest amazement he had read in the DI’s face at the idea that their friendship might not have been real...

There always seemed to be just as much in support of the one interpretation as there was of the other; he could no longer tell anything with any certainty. And it felt like he was torn apart along a seam that ran through the centre of his entire being. Because only one view could be valid, and even if Ella didn’t like him seeking truth, he could not stop.

He was losing himself in the maze at last, and although he was aware of time passing he could honestly not have said how much of it was going by. The sequence of days and nights became a mere inconvenience that meant he had to turn on the lights occasionally. Which he stopped doing, after a while, altogether.

 .

John found himself standing on the street staring at a lone black figure silhouetted against the sky, he was at the pool wearing a bomb vest, he felt General Shan’s gun against his temple, and the CIA agent’s weapon pressed to his neck. He fell through his memories, all the times that the danger had been gravest. All the times that he had escaped alive and unharmed because... of Sherlock. Who offered him the dangerous life he needed so much but never allowed any real harm to be done to him.

The rational part of his mind warned John that something was wrong with him, that he was lost, weaving in and out of consciousness, but he could not really bring himself to care, surely not enough to return. (He didn’t quite know why, but as he slipped around the edges of consciousness, he was suddenly overcome by the feeling that not returning might be easier.)

Eventually, he found himself back on St. Bart’s roof as he had been in another dream once before, his body reeling with adrenaline as the vision shifted one more time and all he saw was a mud-brown, cracked surface, only inches before his eyes. He was wondering where he was now when the smell registered, and his whole body turned tense and trembling at the same time. Burning tyres.

John was cowering behind a low wall surrounding a kind of courtyard, the Near East sun beating on every surface with the force of a furnace, making the ground hard as concrete and wringing sweat from his every pore. John felt it pouring down his back as he leaned against the wall for support and cover, moving his head up a little to peer over the crumbling top.

Several things about this scenario were just wrong. For one thing, he was alone, which was not at all how it was supposed to be.

Even _knowing_ how this day was going to end, how events were about to unfold, John couldn’t suppress the nerves he had felt back then. They had been sent out to check on this outlying little village on some intelligence suggesting it might be a hideout for the local Taliban that had been giving them an awful lot of trouble those last few weeks.

Things had appeared peaceful enough, their orders simply to go in and search for hidden stashes, confiscate anything that could even possibly be used for a weapon and get back to camp.

It had either been a trap, or simply bad timing, that a considerable number of armed partisans were in when they arrived... Such things happened all the time and did not become a problem if the right decisions were made by the right people.

Against the rules, and Captain Watson’s emphatic protestations, Major Evans had ordered the sprawling maze of buildings to be stormed right away instead of calling in back-up.

And now they were all scattered like sheep, and in this courtyard, maybe a dozen metres from his current position. John watched three men dying, their blood irrigating the barren soil in black rivulets. The sight called up another image of red on grey stone that made the bile rise in John’s throat, which had _not_ happened back then. Of course it hadn’t.

The sniper, somewhere up inside or on the main building on the other side of the yard took another shot at him and John quickly retracted his head and breathed against the tension, waiting for his chance to-

“Watson, go in there for God’s sake and get the boys out! I’ll cover you.” Major Evans’ voice cut through the eerie silence as the man approached him – alone, how had the major let himself be separated from his squadron? – from the general direction of the house.

John did not question the order. There was no time and no use in doing so when you were in the middle of a fight. He could not silence the doubts that were coursing through his head, though. This man’s inadequate assessment of the situation had brought them here, had surely cost several men’s lives for no reason that John could see (and he knew enough about these matters), other than the need to make a mark, to impress superiors or simply to feel self-important. Was there a chance that he would send his medic into a trap like this courtyard if they had not yet got all the men who had entrenched themselves in that building? Would anyone _really_ have his back when he had made his way to the injured comrades lying there and started concentrating on treating them? He voiced none of this, and in the end he would probably not have decided differently, no matter what the answers had been.

Major Evans fell in two steps behind him, his rifle at the ready. And so he went out where there was no cover at all, trudging through the incredible lung-searing heat. John was stubbornly trying to fix the pressure bandage on the first man’s thigh when hell broke loose. Machine-gun fire announced fighting going on in the building, and the sniper used the Major’s distraction to take aim and fire again without giving away his position.

“Where is he? Where the-”

They had to get out of here, immediately.

“Help me move him,” John ordered, grabbing the wounded man – ‘Peters’, his name tag read – under the arms.

The large wooden door burst open, two Afghan Taliban stormed out at full speed, and the last thing John saw of Major Evans was the muzzle of his rifle disappearing behind the cover of the courtyard wall.

Something searing hot and very fast tore through his flesh and knocked him to the ground, where he remained left for dead for five hours before another squadron cleared the village and found him, barely alive because of the blood loss, not the severity of the wound itself. The three young men in the courtyard died that day. Not the last ones to die who John was meant to keep safe though... John frowned at the strange thought he hadn’t had at the time.

As the deafening white noise engulfed him, his last thoughts were _Please God, let me live._

* * *

 

Two days after he missed his appointment with Ella, John woke violently, half throwing himself out of the bed, to the steady beep of a heart monitor and the view of a white hospital wall. And like writing on that very wall, the truth hit him:

 

He had not believed in Sherlock Holmes.

He had _trusted_ him.

 

“I guess he has,” a deep, quiet voice said suddenly, startling John out of his realisation. He turned his head and saw an ancient man in the bed next to his.

“What?” he croaked.

“God seems to have granted your wish, son. I hope I’ll be as lucky.”

It took John’s muddled brain several moments to understand what the man was even talking about. He had spoken in his sleep once again... _Please God, let me live_... What an odd thing to say, really (although he had once contradicted Sherlock’s corresponding claim). He did not even believe in God, he thought incoherently. Did not believe in anything really.

Didn’t trust anyone, either. And that was why all this had hit him like this, like a blow to his head. John Watson just did not trust anyone. Not really. Which was quite funny considering how everyone thought John himself was so very trustworthy, inspiring the feeling in people though he did not know it himself, not fully. He should have remembered this _before_.

“Are you all right? You’ve gone all pale.”

“Fine.”

“Maybe you could include me in your next prayer, son. It seems you’re listened to more than me...”

.

When he woke up the next morning, less tired and weak than the evening before, the doctor in charge was there … He half-listened to the admonishing words the woman directed at him in a well measured mix of concern and exasperation that he found rather less interesting than her striking blond hair and the way her full lower lip got caught under her teeth every now and then. John shook himself, blaming his distraction on not having seen any even halfway attractive woman under sixty for months... Content-wise, he could have told himself the same diagnosis she was delivering now. He had starved himself for too long and must have stopped drinking anything for at least four days, which was what had brought on this circulatory collapse. There was nothing else wrong _physically,_ she said.

“We’ll keep you for another two days but you really need to look after yourself better in future, or you might not be as lucky the next time. If your landlady hadn’t found you this soon...”

John felt his mind go numb at this piece of information. _What did you expect? A social visit of Harry’s? You’d have been mummified by then._ The presence of the acerbic voice was almost a relief to John.

“I’m considering calling in our psychologist to have a look at you-“

His first instinct was to tell her that he already had a therapist, but the idea of Ella hearing of this made him think again. “N-not n-necessary.”

Doctor Marshall eyed him curiously, probably wondering if his stutter might be a sign of yet undetected neurological problems, or simply another good reason to call the psychologist. “I think it is, Mr...”

“ _Doctor_ Watson.” John gave her the trustworthy look, the one he hoped might get him off the hook. Dr Marshall’s face lit slightly as she checked his personal data once more, and promised to have another chat with him herself instead of bothering their psychologist.

.

The hospital didn’t offer much privacy. It was one thing John had always hated about sick bays, too, and so he’d made sure that his own patients got at least a modicum of quiet. No one at St. Bartholomew’s seemed to share that perspective. The old man he had woken up next to the evening before had been gone in the morning, only to be replaced, after the doctor’s visitation, by a middle-aged man with a paunch and curious, baggy eyes. Nurse after nurse came into their room to bring their breakfast (John forced himself to eat the slimy porridge and equally slimy scrambled eggs to prove his goodwill), check their vitals, change sheets. To his shame, John did not manage to visit the toilet on his own, cane or no cane, so he was forced to use the bedpan. And _that_ was another humiliation he really could have dispensed with.

All those people, all the noise and movement, the busy atmosphere of the hospital, was too much after nine months of solitude of the harshest kind. He felt like some newt caught from under its dark stone, suddenly put under the glaring lab lamps of students waiting to get their scalpels into him for their first vivisection. _Lovely image, John._ He controlled his breathing at hearing Sherlock’s voice in his head so very clearly. _And Ella’s not even here._

All he wanted was to be left alone, because it terrified him how very alone he still _felt_ among all these people. He needed to think properly and he could only do that when he was alone.

He didn’t want people he knew to see him here, and like this, either. (It seemed that all choice was out of his hands once again. Ella would have deemed this proper punishment, he supposed.) And those he didn’t know were of no relevance to him, but particularly, his new room-mate tried, stubbornly, to strike up a conversation. The only way out seemed to be falling asleep, and so John did just that, eventually.

.

When he woke again later that afternoon, opening his eyes to an appallingly bright sun, Mrs Hudson was sitting in the visitor’s chair with that tidy but slightly frail air of hers. John took her hand and apologised for giving her such a fright.

“Oh no. It’s quite all right. They tell me you forgot to drink, my boy.” She patted his hand absent-mindedly. “I know that can happen. You know, it’s happened to Sherlock as well. And worse...,” she added with an odd faraway look. “Before you came along, obviously.”

John merely nodded.

“Not that _he_ looked after _you_ even half as well, did he,” Mrs Hudson mused. “But if he were here...”

“Even _he_ might have noticed if I collapsed,” John added.

“Don’t be stupid, John Watson.” Mrs Hudson’s eyes were narrowed. “If he’d see you like this he’d go mad with worry.”

“Hm.”

“Don’t you _hm_ me, young man.”

“Sorry, Mrs Hudson,” he said sheepishly. The old lady really deserved better than this, especially after what he had done to her. He could only imagine what it had been like for her, finding him unconscious, unresponsive. “Thank you for the pastries.”

“Just make sure you eat them.”

“Always have to feed us...” the words died on John’s tongue. “...to feed someone up, don’t you?”

“Just so you know,” the lady, who John should have remembered earlier had faced down CIA agents, informed him, “when you return to Baker Street you will no longer keep me out of that flat of yours. It’s still my house. And you’ll have to bear my company and have tea with me at the very least.”

John nodded in consent.

.

Mike Stamford came by shortly after that, and John decided that it was a good thing the man was lecturing students now and not working at the hospital, because the open shock when he took in John’s state was close to offensive. At least he went back to work quickly, unable to get out anything but a few half-sentences. He left a newspaper though, tapping on it as if it might say those things he had failed to say.

John turned the thing over with a sigh, guessing what he would find in there. He put it on the nightstand, unopened. Which did not help anything, because his friendly room-mate couldn’t let a newspaper go to waste, it seemed, and was reading it when John awoke from a nap.

“Are you... you are John Watson, aren’t you?”

“Hm?”

“I mean you’re this John Watson,” the man poked the paper with his finger emphatically, confirming John’s direst fears, “the one who-“

“I’m the o-one who lies in hospital and n-needs rest.”

“Oh, right.” The man looked uncomfortable at the reproach for maybe three seconds. “But you are the one with the blog, right?”

“Please, could you-“

“Listen,” the man interrupted and started reading. “DI Lestrade, who reopened investigations into the background of the mysterious and highly controversial ‘suicide’ of Sherlock Holmes, gave the following statement: ‘To the police there is no doubt that the man found dead on the roof of St. Bartholomew’s hospital was James Moriarty, a leading figure in organised crime, head of a globally operating crime syndicate. The identity of Richard Brook that he used to discredit Sherlock Holmes was a very well constructed fake, as we know now that no person of that name has ever existed outside of computer systems which we could prove had been hacked and manipulated by Moriarty or his affiliates. Further investigations into the crimes allegedly committed by Mr Holmes have shown the lengths to which the criminal organisation was prepared to go to ensure Mr Holmes’ arrest. At this point we can only speculate about the underlying motives, but the most likely explanation is that Mr Holmes was perceived as a threat to some or all the syndicate’s future criminal operations in London. At present, the exact circumstances of Mr Holmes’ death are not yet entirely clear. We must assume that he did not take his own life for previously assumed reasons, since those have obviously lost their relevance with the new information on James Moriarty. Why Moriarty shot himself is equally obscure at the moment.’ Be sure not to miss the start of our new series, _Sherlock Holmes, The True Story,_ next Monday,” the man read out.

Two emotions were chasing each other in John’s mind. Firstly, fury that the press were having a field day _again_ , making another million from just writing the very opposite of what they had before, and not caring in the least about the truth (and what truth they’d be spreading come next week) they were purportedly selling.

And secondly, a feeling of shame at discovering only now that it had been Lestrade who had reopened Sherlock’s case. John groaned inwardly. The DI had bided his time, and after months, succeeded in setting the ball rolling, throwing doubt on the scandalous story and making the world see how wrong they had done by the extraordinary man John... His breath caught painfully as he managed to shun the end of this sentence, the word. He wondered if they had given him tranquilizers for his guard to be down like this.

“I guess those “Believe in Sherlock” weirdos can stop now.”

“What?”

.

Lestrade, too, had heard of his embarrassing breakdown. And he obviously suspected that he might somehow be a reason for it.

“You couldn’t just do what I asked for, could you?”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Yes, it is.” Lestrade stood looking out of the window, noticing, as John had, that he could see the spot of Sherlock’s death from there, and turning away sharply. “You know what I don’t understand? Why did he jump, John? There was no reason for him to; the truth would have come out sooner or later, and he must have known that!”

John found he could still not tell him, couldn’t say anything at all. Not even thank him for making the truth come out...

“Do you think it really was the pressure?” _Do you think it was my fault?_ John could almost hear the words Lestrade didn’t speak.

He managed to shake his head at last “No, it really-” But he could not possibly unburden all of this hurt on Lestrade, knowing that if he started talking now everything would spew forth in a giant wave of guilt and pain, washing up from the sewers. But he had to give Greg something.

“You remember what you said to me, that night when you did the drugs bust?”

Lestrade's pained face told him yes. _Sherlock Holmes is a great man. And I think one day, if we’re very, very lucky, he might even be a good one._

“I think you were right, you know,” John rasped. He knew Lestrade would catch on eventually, finding out about the selfless motives the police had obviously not yet found any evidence of. And he wondered what the DI would make of loyal, believing John and his doubts then...

Unable to avoid communicating with his room-mate entirely, John passed the rest of the day with disinterested comments on the man’s annoying small talk that centred, awfully but not really surprisingly, around this new scandal. Had that really been the investigating police officer? And why did John no longer write his blog? Did he think they’d make a documentary about Sherlock Holmes one day? Or a movie? John fled into sleep once again, after they’d had what was called dinner only in a very loose application of the term.

.

“John.” John opened his eyes obediently. Which made sense considering that the British government towered over his bed, and Mycroft’s face was unlike John had ever seen it before.

“Hello, M-”

“Would you be so kind as to explain _what_ in God’s name you are doing here?” John had never before heard his voice laced with suppressed fury like this, a promise of _There’ll be hell to pay_. It was not a nice thing to wake up to. “Dr Watson, I have asked you a question. I am waiting.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I expect you to explain why you have given up, John.” All of a sudden, John knew that Mycroft was lying; the man who was so very good at hiding and manipulating could not meet his eyes. It reminded him strongly of their confrontation at the Diogenes Club, when Mycroft had had to (more or less) admit to the terrible mistake he’d made and its consequences. He was trying to hide something again.

“Why not ask my therapist, Mycroft? You know full well why I’m here! Or if you forgot, just listen to your tapes again, or have you paid Ella to report to you directly? All in all, I don’t think I have to tell you anything.”

Mycroft stayed silent for an incredible amount of time, time that John thought he rarely spent on something so very mundane as not knowing what to say. What was there to say, after all, when you’ve been caught?

“You know, I have never had any use of psychologists myself. I doubt their worth, as you might remember from our very first conversation. I cannot lose the impression that people who know neither you nor those who are important to you, have no business monopolising the truth of your life.”

“But you do?”

“No. But I know my brother. My lonely, fragile, genius little brother who has never had anyone like you before, John.”

John couldn’t help shutting his eyes even though it didn’t stop the words registering, of course. He would not let Mycroft of all people see his reaction to this.

“We may not conform to your idea of how a family should be, and he may not always have been the friend _you_ wished for or needed – knowing Sherlock he surely wasn’t – but he _was_ your friend.”

“Or was I _his_ friend?”

“Oh, I see.” Mycroft’s contempt when he figured out Ella’s reasoning (in less than two seconds) was tangible in those three words. “You know what’s funny? When we last met, you told me you were afraid that Sherlock might not have known what your friendship meant to _you_. So, tell me, how do you get from there to _here_?”


	16. Trust Issues

“Oh, good to see you John.” Ella gave him her customary check-up and John wondered immediately if she knew his reasons for missing their last appointment. But the therapist’s face stayed unreadable, as it was most of the time. “I hope you have used the time to give some thoughts to our last conversation.”

_No, I was too busy enjoying my brilliant life_. He opted for keeping his mouth shut, hoping fiercely that Ella would let go the question of where he had been, and answered only with a non-committal “Hm.”

“Well, be sure that I have.”

The air of finality in her voice gave John goosebumps. He felt no particular wish to hear any more of Ella’s authoritatively presented convictions on Sherlock’s inability to have friends. Because he _had_ used the time out of hospital for thinking, as well. Though between Mrs Hudson’s daily visits for tea and Mycroft’s poignant, if unsigned (really that man was a self-important jerk), texts, he had not been allowed to crawl back into that dark labyrinth of his.

He was sure that Ella would not concur with his deliberations, or his conclusion, though. Hell, _he_ didn’t know yet what to make of them.

 

Eventually fed up with his lengthy silence, Ella began. “Well, if you have no inclination to share your thoughts... Let me summarise our last conversation, then. You want to believe in something. You want to believe certain things about your flatmate. About yourself.” Ella waited for him to look up. “Well, that’s perfectly all right, John. People have to believe in something. Everybody does, no matter how they protest that to be untrue. Mostly, people develop belief in a higher being, in an entity they call God. But it is not at all that uncommon for people with a higher education to believe in something else. Some believe in an idea, like you did once. Some start believing in another human being.”

Ella waited for a moment, then shook her head at his continued silence.

“You are desperate to find an objective truth that can serve as a fundament to your very own personal belief system. And you can’t stop searching for justifications, rationalisations, and circumstantial evidence that allow you to uphold your belief in a dead man.”

Yeah, well. First mistake, since it was not _belief_ , as John had so belatedly realised...

“There is only one problem here, John, isn’t there? Because you are aware that something about that ‘friendship’ you keep claiming isn’t quite right, not even to you, or you wouldn’t have told me that list, filled to the brim with doubt about where you stood with that man. And _friendship_ -”

“I-Isn’t it weird that you are the only one... ” John interrupted her, and then hesitated. He would be getting nowhere with this, but couldn’t stop. “Mycroft, Mrs Hudson... Lestrade. They are convinced that Sherlock and I were friends beyond a shadow of a doubt. If you even care to know; I mean you made me invite someone, so...”

“John. As glad as I am to hear you met your friends – and even that you were able to talk about your dead flatmate – insights other than yours are entirely irrelevant here,” Ella’s voice took on a less pleasant tone. “So no, I don’t care about their opinions.”

“Well, _I_ c-care about their opinions. After all they ha-have at least kn-nown us,” he said, hating the tell-tale stammer that screamed “doubt.”

“What? All of a sudden you value their opinions on your flatmate, when the last time we talked, you pointed out in incredible detail just how wrong people were about him? How they only ever saw part of him? How hard it was to understand what might really be going on in the man’s head? When you yourself have not been able to arrive at a conclusive picture of your flatmate’s personality _or_ even his feelings for you?”

“Could you stop calling him my ‘flatmate?’” John ground out.

“Could _you_ concentrate on the pertinent parts of what I’m saying?” Ella countered levelly. “Really, John, you shouldn’t have spent so much time on the question of whether your friend was a sociopath, but on wondering if everything’s all right with _you_. Can’t you see that you are manipulating yourself to an extent that’s frankly reached incredible proportions, choosing from people’s opinions and views _exactly_ those parts that fit with the imagery you are busy building in your head, to stylise your flatmate into something you want to have been true? I have to warn you: You _will_ lose yourself for good if you continue this.”

Remembering what had happened to him after Lestrade’s visit, John could not really argue with that. Indeed, he had to accept that she was right here, because it had been _exactly_ his attempts at reconciling those conflicting views on Sherlock that had driven him into the maze he had lost himself in.

“But after what happened last month you probably figured that out yourself...” Ella mirrored his train of thoughts. John jerked his head up abruptly, then stared down at his feet. “Did you honestly think I was not going to hear about what happened? Why you couldn’t keep your appointment last month?”

John couldn’t meet her eyes. Who had told her? Mycroft? He wondered vaguely when he was eventually going to fall off Mycroft’s radar, but the texts he received now made it clear that getting himself into hospital had not helped that end. Or with Ella...

“And h-how can you b-be so sure that _you_ are right? Th-that I’m ma-ma,” John dug his fingernails deep into his thigh with frustration, “man-nipulating myself, that I’m m-m-making it all up?”

“The fact that you have to ask that is almost proof of how far removed from reality your own perception of how the man treated you is by now. After everything, all those anecdotes, all those dangerous episodes you’ve told me, there is no good reason to believe that he _was_ your friend.”

“Yes, there is. I _told_ you we were friends, but you don’t believe me. And you asked me if Sherlock had told me I was his friend. And he actually did, you know, if not in those words. _You are not the most luminous people but as a conductor of light you are unbeatable._ ” And what else was there to be? John marvelled at how long it had taken him to realise the true significance of those words...

“And that is supposed to convince anyone? Anyone who is not determined to read into this, frankly, rather doubtful praise what you want to? We arrived at the conclusion last time that he was no sociopath, but manipulating and getting whatever he wanted by pretence was obviously his receipt for success, didn’t we? Besides, _when_ did your flatmate say this? Before or after he tried that experimental drug on you?” Of course he had to have told her about that...

For a moment, the world seemed to slide out of focus, as the possibility of Sherlock’s ridiculous praise, exuberant, being a means of manipulation registered, was processed by the insecure, heartsick part of his mind, and left him with a thudding heart.

And then, Mycroft’s parting words replayed in his mind.

_“How do you get from there to_ here _?”_

_“By thinking too hard...” John had offered quietly. Mycroft scoffed._

_“You call that thinking? You always kept telling us that you were no idiot, John. Start thinking for yourself, then. You know perfectly well what you and Sherlock were about. Although... I assume with as narrow and unreliable a mind as yours, it is easy enough for someone determined and insistent to confuse you.”_

John suddenly smiled slightly. No. He wouldn’t let Ella take him there anymore.

“You think that’s funny, John? People you think are your friends not only putting you into dangerous situations but _creating_ them for you? Have you got the least idea what that drug could have done to a man with PTSD like you? It could have triggered a psychotic relapse. You could have-” Ella stopped herself, drawing a deep breath.

“I’m fed up with this, John. You do not listen to a single word I say, do you? I will tell you once again, and I’ll try to make myself as clear as I can be on the matter: It does not matter what other people say – or what you tell me your flatmate said to you. There is no ‘truth’ to know about that man, and absolutely no use _at all_ in your making it up.

This is about _you_. And while I appreciate that it is particularly difficult for you with your history of abuse and neglect I cannot accept that you refuse to work through this.”

“Refuse? I-”

“Oh, yes, you do. For ten months now, you’ve avoided looking at yourself _so_ carefully. Why is that, John? Have you ever asked yourself that? Everything and everyone gets scrutinised and analysed beyond recognition. Your constructions of the past get ever more complex and stable. But where are _you_ in all this, John? Look at yourself, for once, and tell me what you find there. So far, you have not let yourself go any deeper than taking on – and defending forcefully – this generic role of “friend.” I told you when you first turned up on my doorstep again that you have to say it at some point. And that point is long past. All I got from you – in ten months! – is that you miss him-”

“And I trust him,” John said simply, registering Ella’s unblinking stare at this with a tiny bit of glee at shutting her up.

“You... Oh.” Ella seemed to be stuck for words. No wonder, seeing how they had covered this ground more than two years ago establishing that _John Watson never relied on anyone, never trusted anyone either._

Which was exactly why he had cleared Mycroft’s awfully clairvoyant comment, _Could it be that you have chosen to trust Sherlock Holmes, of all people?_ from his mind whenever it tried to creep up on his awareness and trigger all his alarms. His answer, had he given one, would have been yes. Yes, for fuck’s sake.

So Ella’s original diagnosis had been right, in this respect at least. She had told him, back then, that it was no wonder he was having trust issues (and she had told him outright that she assumed there was some history in his family, but let it go when John clamped up immediately). That trusting would always be difficult for him. Yes, it had been. It was. He had not trusted anyone from his family, or any of his lovers, for that matter, as much as he had this odd man. For no better reason than a gut feeling that it was the right thing.

No, not even that. It had been the only thing he seemed to be able to do.

But wasn’t that exactly how it _should_ be? With normal, healthy, un-trust-issue-ish people?

John snorted at the certainty that back then, Ella would have noted this down as progress. Now though, she seemed unable to see his trust as anything but misplaced and pathological in itself. He had a feeling he’d never succeed in disabusing her of the notion, no matter what, though he had obviously thrown her with his sudden concession.

“And how is it you can tell that, all of a sudden? Do you even _know_ what trust is, John?”

He remembered the scenes he had been reliving during his unconsciousness, before that horrible day in Afghanistan had returned to him, and the feeling that Sherlock had really been the only person in his life he had relied on _unconditionally,_ with no reserve, was so strong that it was actually unpleasant.

“Yes, I do now.”

 

“I am not convinced, John.”

John felt that one like a hit to the gut. His so-called therapist didn’t even seem to get how _hard_ it had been for him to admit this... weakness to himself. He had expected a lot of reactions to this but not... this quick dismissal.

He tried his best not to show how shaken he felt, though, retorting angrily:

“Yeah, well, excuse me for having _trust issues_ when the last time I trusted someone against my better judgment, I barely just survived, and three young men I was at least partially responsible for died. Believe me, that did nothing much to inspire belief in any kind of higher being, nor my trust in anything or anyone... But that doesn’t mean I can’t trust anyone at all, or don’t know what trust is.”

“No, you’re right. But that’s not what I meant. The question is, if you know where to place your trust in those rare cases that you feel it... and whether or not it’s returned,” she murmured, as an afterthought. “So, all of a sudden, you’re telling yourself you have trusted him – and I assume you aren’t just trying to sell me this, but really believe it yourself.”

John gave an open-handed gesture of “so what?”

“Can’t you see how little sense this makes, when you can’t even tell with any certainty whether the two of you have even been _friends_? John, honestly. Does that make any sense? I’ll give you my impression of this: You are aware that there can be no closeness between people who cannot trust, right?  And so in order to vindicate your... construction that you were proper friends, you’re suddenly even talking about trusting that man.”

John held to the remnants of his determination. “It’s not like I can say _anything_ to convince you that I did trust him, can I? Or that he was, indeed, my friend.”

“I wouldn’t say that. It’s just that I think I’m beginning to understand now that,” Ella’s speculative tone John the creeps, “what you keep calling friendship looks a _lot_ like codependency, from where I’m standing.”

Anger shot through him like tea drunk down too hot, too fast.

“I’m not the first person to suggest this to you, am I? I can see it in your face,” Ella stated curiously.

“Not in those words.”

“No, but someone noticed there was something... strange, didn’t they?”

“She didn’t notice, she insinuated!”

Ella watched him with pursed lips for a moment. “You really think so, don’t you? Of course it comes naturally to you. That much is clear after that list you rattled off to me last time... It’s a relief to you, isn’t it? You are used to being – and subconsciously aiming to be – controlled, determined by someone else’s will...”

“I do _not_ -“

“You think it’s a coincidence that you chose working for the army, even though your profession as a doctor would have given you plenty of other options? You _do_ seek-”

“You k-know what, Ella? This makes no sense at all. How can I have severe trust issues – your diagnosis, not mine – and at the same time, purportedly, relinquish control to someone else? Don’t you think there’s a... logical problem?” _...in your deductions,_ the voice added.

“Oh, it makes an awful lot of sense actually; makes things worse, too, though. You know, your... inability to trust would have kept you safe from this under normal circumstances. You’ve got that right.” She smiled grimly. “Almost. Because you just told me you _did_ trust him, of all people. And aren’t you always going on about how clever that man was? He knew it and made it work for him!”

John was too much caught up in the conflicting emotions Ella’s new line of enquiry were eliciting to reply with anything, or even know what his answer would have been.

“You can’t seem to see that what you call friendship is your psyche’s attempt to construct an alternate explanation for what you can’t accept yourself to have permitted,” Ella went on.

“What the _fuck_ are you going on about?”

“John, I told you I’d been thinking about what you told me. And about your incredible difficulty in gauging your relationship to that man you call your best friend still. You see, it’s not at all unusual for someone with your... history, your family background, to feel drawn to this kind of abusive relationship.”

“A-ab-” John was too angry to get the word out. He felt his face flush – and the remains of his calm dissipate.

“You have to understand that what seems like friendship to you was a special kind of codependency. Honestly, it’s the only explanation _I_ could come up with for your willingness to allow that man to exert his own compulsion for control over you.”

“I don’t have abus-”

“The hell you don’t. You allowed that man to exert his own compulsion for control over you to his heart’s content. How else could he make _you_ change your entire world view like this? Or are you really thinking that accepting this drugs “experiment” of his with good grace complies with your character? That is not friendship, but dependency. I’m not saying that this did not go both ways, but he clearly took advantage. Can’t you see how much this follows the pattern your parents set for you?”

 

“YOU. ARE. WRONG.”

John could not remember getting to his feet but he found himself snarling those words, towering ( _As much as you are capable of,_ the voice remarked) over Ella in her armchair. Because it was enough. It was more than he was willing to take, and to be honest, simply more than he _could_ take.

“Then TELL me, for God’s sake! Tell me something of _you_. Anything about you, really, because I wonder if you can see yourself in that head of yours anymore! Anything that offers even a shred of explanation for your reckless, self-destructive behaviour, your relationship to that man, your debilitating _grief_!”

“You don’t LISTEN. I trusted him. I would have gone to hell and back with him, and I do not care to hear your fucking interpretations anymore. Cause, you know what, maybe you’re right: Maybe Sherlock is a neurotic, psychotic wreck, trying to control the fuck out of everyone, and not feeling anything much of what people are supposed to feel. Maybe his psychological make-up is, indeed, too defective to cause anything but rejection – or revulsion if I consider your words – in just about everyone.

And maybe I am nothing more than some masochistically-inclined nobody who sought and found a way to burden my choices in life on somebody else’s shoulders, while drastically overrating my own importance in Sherlock’s life, seeing a friendship where only some weird... symbiosis existed. All that may be true, but I know, no matter how imperfect and flawed we both are... were, we were better together. And I don’t care for the rest.

We were _better_ than we were alone!”

Ella’s gaze held something undefinable as she stared up at John for a few heartbeats. Which were hard and painful in John’s chest, as his brain slowly caught up with what he’d said. And what he’d almost said...

“Trust, then...” she eventually said, lowly. “Well, that is something, John. Maybe we _are_ getting somewhere.”

John was too surprised to reply with anything at all.

Checking her wristwatch, Ella suddenly straightened up, and her voice returned to normal. “I’m afraid our time’s up for now.”


	17. Others: Harry

While the white-hot rage was burning itself down into hatred of all those horrible words Ella had used to make him lose it, John’s head was still ringing with his outburst, and it felt like his intestines were stuck in the wrong places, everything in him a knot of incomprehension. Directed towards Ella, sure, but just as much towards himself.

One thing was certain, though: Ella knew the power of words spoken aloud. Her never-ceasing demands to say what he had not said, what he had to say, of finally saying... it. She clearly knew that _saying_ made things real, had the power to change everything, even if the speaker had _thought_ these same things a million times over.

It was like sending those ephemeral creations of sound waves into eternity resonated from infinity’s walls, altering the fabric of reality.

_God, you’re getting esoteric now?_ John gave a low groan that got him a strange look from the woman sitting across from him on the tube. But how else had speaking of his trust – and shouting out that declaration of... yes, what? – aloud shifted his perception of everything again?

He had never meant to admit his _trust_ to Ella, once he had identified it himself, because he fully expected her to not take his claim seriously (though not ridicule it), after what they had talked about right after Afghanistan, and her diagnosis. What she had done now, though, twisting this painful concession – his _confession_ really – into something so very ugly... John took a deep breath. What was worst was the fact that the way Ella analysed, structured, and interpreted things from her point of view made them all make a horrible amount of sense – he appreciated that. Ella’s insinuations ( _good word, nothing more than that_ ) had the ring of truth to them because part of John’s reaction to Sherlock, part of the dynamic that had come alive between them, _was,_ maybe, indeed due to those past events Ella ascribed so much meaning to. Not in the way Ella believed, though.

Neither had he planned on giving that... speech. Embarrassingly enough, his own words had come as more of a surprise to him than they should have. He was just glad that he had managed to cram the plug in before he made things even worse. Still, in his head, what he had not said was still screaming loudly at him: That not only had they been _better_ together, which would probably make it John’s understatement of the year, but that – he felt – they had been... well, kind of _whole_.

He had only realised that was what he was going to say while speaking, and now he tried his best to shove this word, the concept this evoked, back where it had come from. With little success.

 

After the ups and downs of the last months, John would have confidently said that getting more emotional, sentimental, was quite beyond him but that was not exactly right, as he had to learn in the following weeks.

The question of trust, his reasons for trusting Sherlock, and his motives for not asking the same kind of trust in return, haunted him because he could not ignore the truth of some of Ella’s observations.

Sherlock had _not_ reciprocated all of what John had invested in their friendship; he saw very well how Ella had gathered as much from the range of those observations he had shared with her. She was right to marvel at his readiness to forgive Sherlock’s experimenting on him at Baskerville; that was _not_ like him, at all.

And, hell, he had proof of that fact, too. Because Sherlock _hadn’t_ trusted him with the truth of what was going on with Moriarty. He had not.

The enigma of it all, to John, was why the hell it didn’t change an iota of how much he himself had trusted Sherlock, believed in him, wanted to protect him...

His breath caught at that last one, without any reason he could see.

There was an answer; there had to be. You didn’t just do or accept these things without a reason, and it should tell him something that he had pretty much surrendered himself (he could not find anything much to contradict Ella’s claim that he had) to Sherlock, but his mind was thankfully completely unable to follow the question of why.

Realising this, he also had to accept that Ella had been right about one other thing: John had never tried to analyse himself, neither with regard to Sherlock, nor anything in his life, really. As much time as he’d spent on getting behind the man’s façade (God, almost eleven months, and that was not counting in the time he’d spent trying with Sherlock still around!), he had learnt early on, and thoroughly, not to look at himself too closely. _That’s a foundation for successful therapy, I’m sure._

Then again, saying what he had said and hearing the truth in his own words ( _that’s ridiculous, you can validate the correctness of your deliberations without uttering them!_ ) was what supplied him with the strength to defy Ella’s latest attempt to deconstruct Sherlock’s and his friendship.

 

Between the awareness that he couldn’t figure himself out really, the annoying texts he received from Mycroft every now and then, and Mrs Hudson’s now inexorably inevitable tea sessions in the afternoon, the month was going so badly that John was not even astonished when it took the worst turn imaginable. Mrs Hudson was just piling their tea cups on the tray when someone knocked on the door.

John struggled to his feet and looked out of the window, a still necessary precaution.

“Not the press again!” Mrs Hudson sighed, frowning unhappily. Since the publishing of _Sherlock Holmes, The True Story_ had started, the press had resumed their annoying activities in front of 221B.

“No, worse.” John squinted at the figure standing on the doorsteps one last time but there was really no mistaking the slim, dark blonde woman.

“Mycroft Holmes?”

John couldn’t help snorting at that. Mrs Hudson was no more likely to forgive that man than John himself. “Worse than even that.”

Mrs Hudson did not agree with John’s suggestion to pretend they were not at home, unfortunately. Sprightly, for all her talk of hip problems, she bounded down the stairs to admit the visitor, apparently not at all fazed by John’s forbidding expression.

There was a polite knock on the door, the swishing sound of it being opened slowly when he did not reply. Then the sound of heels on the floorboards. He kept his back turned to living room and door, wishing badly he could hide the cane away – vanish himself right with it...

“Hello, John.”

For a second he wondered if his sister might leave again if he ignored her. But not knowing which state she was in made predicting her reaction impossible, so there was nothing for it but to turn around and face this particular problem he could _so damned well_ have done without right now.

“W-why are you here, Harry?”

“I worried about you,” she said quietly.

“ _You_ worried about...” The sarcasm was a reflex, but he trailed off as he took in her appearance. “You... l-look well.” John’s astonishment at finding his words true for once showed clearly in his voice. Harry had the indecency to look chagrined at this.

“You certainly don’t! What the hell have you been doing, John?” she demanded, staring first at the jumper that hung rather loosely around his frame by now, and then his changed face.

But the insolence of this didn’t register. Ella’s words were echoing in his head. _Abusive relationship. Codependency._ The personification, his symbol of all this was standing right in front of him. He had never connected those words to himself... But looking at Harry now, there was an old, old feeling creeping back into his stomach. And he remembered that Harry called up his dark side; why each and every word of hers made him see red with anger. Harry would know all about codependency, everything. Harry and their mum, John and their father, it _was_ copying their fucked up lives. He could no longer pretend he didn’t see the pattern – and he hated Ella with a vengeance for making him.

“You’re a-asking me th-that showing up after... what? S-six months?”

Harry eyes were suspiciously bright but she did not let the tears fall, and that was a sure sign that she was not even slightly boozed at the moment. “I am sorry.”

_Sorry? For what? Not calling, drinking, drinking again after each and every therapy, always taking, taking, taking from him because he couldn’t tell his own sister to fuck off and leave him alone for good?_ John couldn’t say anything. It was glaringly obvious that this was not the same Harry who had let him linger in her house right after – right after. This was more the person he remembered as his sister, but at the same time, more of a stranger since it had been so incredibly long since he had last met her.

Harry drew a long breath and, taking some steps into the room, tried a different tack. “How do you... cope?”

He shrugged, feeling Harry’s eyes on him, making himself look back, return her gaze. The problem with his sister was that she was not stupid at all. Drunk, this aspect of her was often hardly perceptible, and so John had forgotten (even though the nasty, mean things she slurred at everyone at times gave an indication of how sharp she could be when sober).

To cover the silence with which he met her question, John moved in the direction of the armchairs, the fingers of his left hand skimming over the leather back of Sherlock’s chair of their own volition as he went past. For the first time, he allowed himself to sink into the place where his friend should be sitting. Harry took this as her cue to take a seat opposite John.

It was the strangest feeling, like watching the world from the wrong side, somehow, while his forearms resting on the soft, worn leather seemed to soak up the memories of previous touches. John was unable to repress the shudder gripping him that felt like fingers running down his spine.

“It does make you wonder sometimes if it’s worth it, doesn’t it...” Harry murmured, her eyes all the while not leaving John’s face.

He cleared his throat. “If what is?”

“The _caring_ , John,” she said with the long-suffering air of an older sibling. It reminded him oddly of Mycroft. “Caring and failing, that is.”

“Harry...”

“I’ve known you all your life, you know. I know how you work. That you are so very... empathic to pretty much everyone. You have always drawn strays...” Harry smiled slightly at some memory. “But you have never let anyone get to you in the same way, have you? You have always needed to help and take care of them, but you were always careful to keep your distance at heart. And I understand that, you know I do.”

“Wh-what... what are you s-saying?” he asked suspiciously, but too wrong-footed to clam up.

“You think I can’t see what’s happening here?” Harry’s eyes, just the same colour as his own, bored into him. “John, I was _so_ afraid when you came back from Afghanistan that you, too...” She could not bring herself to say it, and John would have been astonished if she had. She never spoke certain words out loud, he knew that. “But it was those days after the funeral that I could see you slip away. You weren’t remotely this bad when you came home two years ago, not by far. I have never seen you like this... Not even-”

“Right. Harry, d-don’t. Just d-don’t try and t-t-talk about this to me, okay?” He was _not_ going to talk sentiments with Harry. But her words had dropped into some empty space inside him neatly. He suddenly, uselessly, wished he had taken Sherlock to Harry, or invited her to Baker Street at least once. He wished she had known him. Why that seemed so important all of a sudden, he was not sure.

“I couldn’t watch you going... down there, John, I...” Harry fell silent. Her therapist had probably told her to talk about her feelings more, John thought uncharitably.

He understood, though. Of course she couldn’t; he empathised completely. After all, _she_ had had _him_ go through that particular brand of hell over and over again. So thank you for this piece of egotism.

“But I ha-had to watch you, m-more than once. Not really fair,” he said eventually, his instinctive anger without real force.

“No, it’s not. I’m sorry for that. And I’m very sorry I was gone all this time. I... I admitted myself to a clinic in Cornwall, and I’m in therapy here, as well, you know. And it’s working this time.”

“Good for you.” What was he supposed to say after he had found her drunk senseless, on that Christmas morning, after her latest ‘successful’ detox?

Harry recoiled, even though (or because?) his voice had been very matter-of-fact. Well, here was one who knew what that calmness really meant. Sherlock had never...

“This is really down to you, John,” Harry interrupted his off-tangent thought. He frowned at her. “When I saw you there, at the hospital and later at my place... you scared the hell out of me, and I realised. You reminded me of _me_. The way I was when I started... when I let go of myself, after running away and losing the last two things, well, people that meant anything to me. It hurt so much that I had to find a way to get out of that pain. You know it was the knowledge that I had not been able to... protect you that destroyed me.” In an almost inaudible whisper she added “Nor mum.”

John felt himself blanch. His windpipe felt tight, all of a sudden. Harry had no right to say this. He did not want to hear it, not now. Particularly not now, but not ever, really. And they were _nothing_ alike.

John simply didn’t think he had the kind of strength it required to go where Harry was headed now. But at this thought, itself, he found his memories rushing out of the dark, dank place he was able to store them in as long as no one stirred them. After all the emotional upheaval he’d been through, Harry’s words were more than enough to open that particular Pandora’s Box. Alike? Them?

God... He fought it, he did, but his emotional barriers were too far down still from that horrible accusation of Ella’s. He grabbed his shaking left hand, and tried to conceal his ragged breathing, all the while hoping that Harry would keep her trap shut. A vain hope. Of course, Harry couldn’t keep quiet through this kind of silence.

“John, are you going to pull through this? Please tell me you will. That you won’t-”

“You have no right to ask anything like this of me!” John shouted. “You can’t just come here and talk like you know me, act the big sister after-” And with this, the rest of everything he had meant to say was gone.

Harry’s eyes filled with tears again as she nodded her acceptance of this.

He _was_ like Harry, in one respect, he surely was. The helplessness, the feeling of perfect powerlessness to save what you knew you had to, the failure too hard to stand... he could feel these himself now. They probably were more similar now, though, than John had ever accepted possible. Because he did know that same pain that had driven Harry to drinking.

And even if he had not sought oblivion in alcohol or drugs, but tried to obliterate this self that had disappointed so much, his was the very same despair she must have faced when she realised her failure to save anyone. Anyone at all.

It had been his duty to keep Sherlock safe and yes, this need to protect his best friend went deeper still than the trust he had had such a hard time seeing.

_Protective –_ Lestrade had even said it. Mycroft’s asking John to save Sherlock from the mistake he had made. And Mrs Hudson’s comment in the hospital. They all showed clearly that everyone had seen it. Still, John had, until now, successfully not put a name to this in his mind. Because he would have had to admit and accept where he’d learnt that sort of behaviour. For the first time he really saw what Harry had given him. That she had taught him to protect what you...

 

“It’s all _your_ fault,” he accused.

“What is?” Harry wiped the tears which continued falling, nonetheless, from her face.

“That this is so hard, Harry! That the fact I couldn’t save him hurts so much. That I fucking care, like this, so much. It’s not like I could have learnt anything about _caring_ from mum or our father, is it...” He’d not meant to say it, not like this, not at all, really. But it definitely had the ring of truth to it, and he watched Harry’s astonished face.

But his words covered only half of the truth, because she was responsible for the downside of this double-edged gift, as well. She was also the one who had finally taught him that you could not trust anyone, in the end. Couldn’t rely even on the one apparently reliable thing in your life.

Which he hadn’t done ever again – until Sherlock.

“God... He must have meant the world to you,” Harry breathed, and her ability to read him had John gritting his teeth.

“I hate you.” 

* * *

 

John and Harry have never got along. Only... that’s not true, the way John makes it sound. He’s never liked Harry – but Harry loved him a lot, he knew.

Harriet, the older, caring sister, tried the best an eight-year-old girl of diminutive build but with a voice like a fire siren could do to save her brother from their father’s “attentions”. She hid him, told him when to leave home and spend the afternoon on the playground, and more than once (more than a dozen times) took the beating that was meant for him.

And John hated her for it all, because she saved him – at the cost of his ridiculous, childish pride. Because didn’t her actions say that he couldn’t defend himself? And didn’t she grow stronger through her continued resistance and renitence? And didn’t she usurp all the attention that came alongside the violence? Father only ever saw her... one way or another. John hated her with all his heart.

Things changed when Harry turned sixteen and moved out overnight. She simply vanished. Although she had warned John, he never took her words seriously before her bed was empty one morning.

John took the beatings intended for him himself then. For one year, in which he started thinking about Harry a lot. Wondering where she had taken herself to, and hating her again, differently – this time for leaving him behind. After that year, he was bigger, strong enough to hit back. Which he did.

At eighteen, he got a letter from Harry and threw it away. He didn’t need her anymore. She could come in person, if she indeed wanted to see him again.

All his childhood, obviously, he was really only envious of his older sister, of her stubbornness, determination, and the way she had fought even as a child to do what she knew was right. John had developed an admiration for her that, to acknowledge, would have been far more painful than despising her was.

When he found out that Harry had started drinking and couldn’t control it, as little as their mother ever could, his trust in his big sister crashed, burnt, ended forever. At twenty, he had been at the point where he not only understood, but was actually prepared to admit to the important role Harry had played in his life – only to find out that the _one_ person of his family that had ever warranted his trust was not worth it at all.

Trust had not been an issue for John Watson ever since: he never felt it again.

.

Harry had taught him betrayal – and how to care.

His father had taught him running for his life – and being strong.

His mother had taught him loss – but also hope.

 

A Watson, it seemed, never did anything by half.


	18. On Protectiveness (Choosing Delusion)

Harry’s visit preoccupied John quite a bit during the days following it. Not in the way he had feared at first, though; the bitterness and anger towards his sister had been gone almost as soon as she had left Baker Street, leaving John feeling mostly just raw.

Under no circumstances could he allow her to try and drag him back into the abyss of the past in addition to the pain he could not escape in the present. It was simply too much, his sister acting like she could see through him – hell, like she even knew anything about him anymore! – on top of Ella driving him mad with her ugly analyses.

With an inward groan, he replayed the angry, shouted words she had provoked him into at the end of last month’s appointment. Because she _had_ , obviously.

And although John had no doubt that she was not going to stop, he had arrived at the decision to keep his appointment – despite his previous fury and his own embarrassment – because he knew he _had_ to. He could not let her have the last word on this ( _More like, couldn’t let her win_ ).

“Good to see you, John.”

John kept his quiet, trying his best to stay in that place of relative calm he had found after Harry’s visit. He leaned back in his armchair, stealing a glance out into the greenery behind Ella’s treatment room.

“Enjoying the view? It’s lovely, this early summer, isn’t it?” Ella inquired politely, letting the silence fall again.

“A cup of tea, perhaps?”

John found himself on the verge of accepting politely, when it registered that this was Ella being sarcastic.

“Excuse me, but why do I have the impression that you think you explained yourself with your... conniption last month?” _And here we go again_. Conniption, right. Ella was raising his hackles in – what? – fifteen words? “Don’t get me wrong. It was... kind of nice to see that there actually _is_ anything going on in your head, because you had almost fooled me there...”

John glared at her irony, which did not seem to impress Ella much.

“But it was not an explanation of any kind, John. You keep doing the exact same thing all the time: evading the real issues as much as I let you, and not saying anything at all whenever my questions get too close to touching… a nerve. All your outburst  has shown is that you are fully aware of how … shall I say astoundingly – or disturbingly? – _your_ perception of your flatmate differs from that of anyone else.”

Funny, John was pretty sure he had let on far more than that. _Maybe Ella should try listening instead of talking for a change_ , the voice suggested.

“This urge to defend him, and justify yourself, leaves no doubt that you appreciate this contrast, as well. You remember telling me that you were not ‘supposed to’ miss your friend like this? So, you must know how different, I’d even say unique, your view of him is. How others saw a very different person, obviously.”

“Didn’t you j-just niggle at me for caring about others’ opinions? And now you want me to co-co... comment on them?”

“Oh, no. That was not at all what I was getting at. I couldn’t care less for who is ‘right’. But John, what am I supposed to make of this? You refuse to give me the full picture of yourself in this, only ever hinting at the difference you perceive between yourself and ‘everyone else.’ You merely define your position through opposing others. So I have to wonder: What is your explanation for these divergent perceptions of your flatmate?”

Before Harry’s visit he would probably have been unsure himself, but he could have answered Ella now if there was _any_ chance she would understand... He had not reacted to Sherlock like almost everyone else because he was finely tuned to keeping apart, carefully, what people wanted to appear to be and what they really were. He had been forced to acquire this ability to understand what was going on in others as a child, by learning the hard way that not knowing what was expected of you at any given moment could well mean the difference between a broken finger and a broken arm; he had honed it during his time as a doctor (to see through lies about domestic violence, downplaying pain etc.) and also learnt to rely on this ability as a soldier (where knowing 100% what your comrade was about and exactly _how_ far you could depend on them was a matter of survival). He had seen men apparently larger than life in every aspect – and seen them turn tail and run. And he’d seen scrawny newbies defend two injured officers for a quarter of an hour till help arrived.

So _he_ was not judging people on words or appearances. Only on their actions.

Knowing that he could not bring forward this argument with Ella was eating at him. She was never going to believe that Sherlock’s... fall was anything but a suicide. She had made her stance on this very clear.

“You know, m-maybe I just don’t judge people on their t-talk, but only by what they do.”

“ _You_ judge him on his actions? John!” Ella seemed on the verge of either laughing or saying something inappropriate, then her mouth shut with an audible click.

“Those things you told me – to impress upon me the very opposite, I know – show quite clearly to what extent your continued association with that flatmate of yours has twisted your perception, John. We discussed it; I told you _my_ impression of what was going on there, even if you won’t accept the abusiveness…” Ella broke off, making a soothing gesture when it became clear that John was close to snapping at her.

“Don’t you see that you cannot seriously admit to the possibility of dependency, exploitation, in the way you did last time, and yet tell me this meant an _improvement_? That you were both ‘better’ for-”

“You asked m-me to tell you about my take on... things,” John interrupted, trying to stop her going down that same road. “If you d-don’t like or a-accept it, that is not my problem.”

Ella gave him a sad smile. “But you’re saying exactly what one would expect someone in your... position to say. How many victims of abuse have you treated, John? How many of them admit to what happens to them?”

John choked on his urge to contradict her, but he still managed to cling to his calm reserve. He would not let himself be goaded by her this time. Harry’s visit was a poignant reminder of what his life might have turned into... if it hadn’t been for this unlikely, incredible clash of Sherlock’s and his life. And they had indeed been... better together. John smiled grimly against the hollow feeling somewhere in his stomach, as he shoved the word ‘whole’ in his mind’s attic with all his might. _A place that may one day contain more than the space you inhabit in your mind_ , the voice warned. He was not like Harry; he did not engage in abusive relationships, and he would simply not fall for Ella’s ridiculous attempts at fishing for a reaction anymore.

“Sorry. I am digressing. What I am trying to say here is, that all I can see you doing is defending him like a …” she paused. “Defending him, _despite_ all the things he made you face and go through.”

 _No, not despite_ , the voice remarked shrewdly.

“Someone had to protect him,” John heard himself whisper, correcting Ella’s choice of words in spite of himself.

 _Protective._ There it was, again, and he’d said this one out loud, too... Why was this word suddenly so difficult, John wondered? Ever since Greg had talked to him, the word felt wrong, bit into him each and every time he so much as thought it. Still, he could not deny the correctness of the assessment, Harry had brought up again. There _was_ something about Sherlock that made John want to protect him… And it was completely understandable that he felt that way! Sherlock seemed helpless when it came to everyday things, didn’t he? Couldn’t even buy his own milk. John had almost choked in surprise when, out in Dartmoor, it had turned out Sherlock could actually drive…

* * *

God… ‘protective’ really didn’t quite cover it, did it?

Shooting the cabbie. Leaving Soo Lin, not even thinking really, to make sure his idiot genius friend didn’t get himself killed. Offering his life to allow Sherlock to get away from that pool alive. Not telling Sherlock what had become of… Irene. Killing that dog, even though each and every drug-induced instinct had told him to cower and hide and run. There seemed to be pretty much no major case of theirs in which John had _not_ found reason to exhibit his protective streak. He couldn’t even defend himself by diagnosing this as a slowly growing expression of their friendship, could he? ‘Cause killing that man point blank had made it more than clear that, right from the beginning, there was nothing at which he’d draw the line.

Plus, there was every kind of sacrifice involved John could think of:

Shooting a man could have got him sent to prison, or at least have cost him his pension if anyone found out about John still possessing a weapon, and having another death on his conscience was not something he would usually have expected himself to be okay with – this had not even registered with him until long after that night.

Risking that Chinese girl’s life had pained him, but he found himself unable to regret the choice he had made. Because the idea of Sherlock running after that professional killer all by himself, unarmed, was completely unbearable. So he had paid with a young woman’s life that time.

Thinking about what he had set into motion that night at the pool, in Moriarty’s presence, was too much right now – he had really tried his best once more but in the end, it had been the beginning of doom. A first rehearsal of the fateful day that had taken Sherlock away from him forever.

Not telling Sherlock about Irene’s death had cost him the ideal of not lying to his friend. He had decided to keep this grim secret for the sake of giving his best friend the gift of ignorance.

Baskerville had cost him the idea of doing what he did out of principle, as a soldier’s reflex and his inherent need to keep people from harm. Because he had learnt that he was willing and able to act against every instinct he possessed, if it came to making sure that Sherlock survived…

 

The theme had been playing in John from the start. All right, Sherlock’s ‘self-important bastard’ persona had not, at first, completely missed its desired effect. After their encounter in the lab at Bart’s, he had taken up and provisionally adopted this projection of Sherlock’s as the man’s true character. But it had lasted no longer than their second meeting. Because things did not add up, at all.

The way this odd man had hurriedly agreed to “straighten things up a bit,” swirling around the room, trying to impress on John that this was indeed a place where he could (should?) live. A thought struck him suddenly; sensing that John was not in such a good mood – mostly because of his leg and, as Sherlock might have assumed, Mrs Hudson’s comments on sharing a bedroom – he had added the offer to take him to the crime scene to the equation. Had he been trying to… bait him? Even then? Had he…

Anyway, this was one moment. But the main point was this: You could not _be_ as collected, condescending, and arrogant as Sherlock pretended to be to absolutely everyone, and yet give anyone that “look.” Not the annoying one – the… vulnerable (gosh, here was another word he was going to be brooding over, he knew it immediately) one of utter astonishment, of disbelief at someone getting how extraordinarily his mind worked.

John’s people compass left him in no doubt that only one option could be true: Either you actually cared nothing for people’s disdain for you... Or you had learnt the hard way to deflect it and not let the constant pain of it show, by simply shutting everyone out, burying those shards of hatred alongside all the others piling slowly, slowly up to a huge mound of glass shards cutting away at your heartstrings.

John knew the art of doing that kind of thing well enough to recognise the “look” immediately.

And _that_ may have been the moment when the possibility of _them_ was born, when he got caught in the net of his own fascination for a man who was so very conscious about the characteristics he projected, but seemed entirely unaware of what he had let _John_ see on that fateful taxi ride.

 

Wincing, John recalled the awkward moment at Angelo’s, after his not quite thought-through comment that he and Sherlock were alike, having no ties… Well, he had only been trying to figure out this new flatmate of his a little, even though he had not really expected to get very far with this direct approach. Still, he had always been rather direct by nature (and should have learnt by now it was no good with most people).

Anyway, he now understood that Sherlock’s reaction, that one-and-a-half second of frowning at him had not meant what he initially suspected (namely that Sherlock felt uncomfortable for having been made some covert offer) but had been Sherlock double-checking on him, searching for previously missed data that might allow the conclusion that John was gay. He would not have found any – therefore the slightly nonplussed expression.

Sherlock had been _so_ confused about someone taking an interest in him simply for the sake of getting to know him…

 

He remembered Sherlock’s flabbergasted reaction as he realised who had shot the cabbie. In retrospect, John could make out now that this had been the moment it all had been decided: When Sherlock, trying to rid himself of the shock blanket, had stopped his machine gun fire of deductions, when his eyes snapped to John outside the cordoned off area. Sherlock’s astonishment had spoken volumes, though John had not been able to read them back then. He believed he could now.

John felt that constricting feeling in his chest he knew so well.

Well, he tended to be protective of his best friend. Even if said friend had – ostensibly – never understood this, as his comments weeks before his… that day showed, when John had been angry at the media for fear they might turn against Sherlock. How could Sherlock have asked him why John would feel bad about the terrible lies people told about Sherlock? How did you even come up with such a question if you really were friends with anyone?

Talking like he didn’t even get the concept of protectiveness. Yes. Right, Sherlock. John gritted his teeth in frustration. The man had played him like a fool, hadn’t he?

* * *

Ella cocked her head.

“Protect? Protective...” Ella gave him her stoniest stare for a moment, then her lips curled slightly in the corners. John felt his face warm at the blatant condescension in her face. “That’s what you call this, John?”

John paused, backtracking if he’d said anything ambiguous. “I tried to watch his back...  then. And I can’t stand hearing you condemn and judge and tear him to pieces now. I _would_ call that protective. What is so wrong about me… protecting my best friend?”

“Oh, nothing as such. You should do that – if the sentiment is deserved and reciprocated.”

John couldn’t suppress the beginnings of a smile at Ella’s mistake, which was cut short when she went on:

“Ah, I see. We are all too stupid to recognise what you _really_ meant to him? Is that the clichéd interpretation you have decided on now?” Ella’s voice had that nasty edge to it again.

“Yes, indeed. You did,” John agreed acidly.

Because he had eventually come to know that she _was_ wrong.

Even after the heartfelt speech that had burst from him with so much violence that his conviction might have seemed unquestionable, it had taken John the better part of the last month to let himself really think through what he had said then, and it seemed that only after Harry’s visit had his mind been desperate enough to resort to his messed up life now, instead of his messed up past long ago.

 

Realisation had dawned on him standing in the door of 221B Baker Street, watching Harry stride down the sidewalk. _He must have meant the world to you._ Even his sister had been able to get that much...

So, what were the chances that he had been making up their friendship, as Ella was convinced he did? The possibility that nothing had meant as much to Sherlock as it had to John was a very real one, he decided, having come up with several instances where Sherlock had not given him the full truth, or even kept it from him on purpose – so he was willing to accept the possibility that Ella was right about this.

But as ambiguous as Sherlock might have been… In the end, there was only _one_ action that really counted, wasn’t there?

Like a fog had suddenly cleared before his eyes, John reached a conclusion so obvious it made him almost laugh.

He _might_ be deluded about their friendship. But even so, Ella was ultimately wrong, he knew, before he arrived at the top of the stairs after seeing Harry off. Because Sherlock had sacrificed himself to save John, so there must have been _something_ about John, about them, for Sherlock to be actually prepared to give his life.

And it meant that Ella’s doubting his judgment was simply wrong, and that he actually should follow his gut feeling. No, not even that, since he had proof of just _how_ right he had been to trust Sherlock all this time.

 _If only he **could**._ Trust issues indeed...

 

“Do you think this… undue show of ‘protectiveness’ is maybe your attempt at making up for the weakness you perceive you showed as a child when you could not fulfil the role you think you should have played to your sister and your mother?”

He felt his determination, his calm resolve to not let himself be baited, dissipating in the face of Ella’s derision as quickly as a drop of water on a heating plate. Maybe Ella’s twisting everything was a compulsory thing...

“You know, you may have been right about everything you said last time, and maybe I am deluding myself about our friendship. But _you_ said I should stop searching for truths, and that there was no truth to know about Sherlock, either. So why would it matter so much to you if I meant as much to him as he meant to me?

Don’t you keep telling me that I should not care about anyone’s opinion but my own? And still you’re all judgmental and delivering sentences about a man you haven’t even met, as you pointed out yourself! How would you even know whether or not the need to protect him was _undue_?”

John had not even been aware of raising his voice before hearing the odd echoes his last words made in the high room. He forced himself to continue more quietly. “All I can say is this: He was my best f-friend, no matter what you think, and I wanted to keep him out of harm’s way as much as I could.” Which had been little enough in the end... “And I have a _right_ to feel protective of my best friend. Is that _really_ so wrong? Or so hard to get? You talk like everything I ever told you about Sherlock proved to you how despicable a man he was, you twist my words, but no one could be as one-sided as you try to make him out to be. Everybody is made up of dark parts, and bright parts... I don’t care what you say, no one’s perfect, everyone has those two sides, so just stuff your hate speeches about Sherlock in future, will you?”

A weird little smile John was too upset to process tugged at the corners of Ella’s mouth at this torrent of words. “Where does this insight come from, John?”

He took a deep breath and told her about those three people and their gifts to him, which he had come to see defined him to a frightening degree. How Harry had taught him betrayal – and how to care; his father, running for his life – and being strong; his mother, loss – and hope.

And for once, Ella listened to what he said, and what he didn’t say without so much as a twitch.

“What has Sherlock Holmes taught you, John?”

And that cut closer to the bone than anything Ella had asked or said today. Because John was damned if he knew how to answer that – apart from the obvious.

“He taught me grief,” he said quietly.

Ella looked at him expectantly. When she saw that no second part to that statement was forthcoming, her shoulders sagged slightly. “And that’s it?”

John pointedly glanced at his watch and got up with the help of his cane. He let himself out without looking back at Ella, who had followed him.

“You must be the most stubborn man I’ve ever met.” There might have been a slightly admiring note to her exasperated words. 

* * *

John sat back in the taxi, his fingers cramped around his cane’s handle. Did that woman even know what she was talking about, how much it hurt to listen to her doing her best to destroy the sad remnants of what was left in him of Sherlock’s and his friendship? And she never gave an inch, fighting every little bit of good he had left in his life – or rather, in his memory. Questioning John, questioning Sherlock, their friendship, them.

It was hard enough to admit that Ella had managed to shake his trust in Sherlock – this incredible gift – he could not fathom why throwing _everything_ into doubt, arguing over each and every tiny bit he said, seemed so very important to her. Why wasn’t he allowed to keep at least a memory of himself as a good friend to Sherlock, even _if_ the rest might have been a lie?

A fake. John drew a deep breath.

What hurt worst, though, and he had to be honest with himself here, was not Ella’s words or her doubts, essentially, was it...

A new dread was creeping over him, as he recalled Ella’s strange look, her complete calm after his... conniption last month; and her odd half-smile today when he finally stood up to her. Was it possible that Ella had realised what he had fought so hard to get out – his trust, his need to take care of Sherlock, hell, his need to understand – not now, but ages ago, and understood the danger this unique status of Sherlock’s in John’s mind meant now?

No, what was hurting so much right now was the return of a feeling he had worked so very hard to repress. Guilt. Which hit him in the face now. Had he allowed Ella to fuck with his mind only to get rid of the guilt he felt over it all?

Mycroft’s words replayed in his mind for the millionth time. He _had_ known better, hadn’t he? At heart? Because he had begun to reevaluate Sherlock’s actions and quirks on the basis of his selfless death quite a long time ago, he _had_ started to suspect what kind of person must have been half-hidden, dissembled, all the time (insight bought at the price of heartache John had not entirely believed possible before) and he had _let_ Ella take it all and skew his own view, twist his mind, to see the very opposite like some puzzle picture.

In order to get some reprieve from the even deeper despair waiting behind that truth, or possibility. And that had been wrong of him.

Even if it had also been wrong of Ella to try such a trick.

No, he should never have allowed her to do this, to try to break his... trust. But this was all going on for so long ( _It’s never going to stop, you know_ , the voice remarked), he had been alone and hurting so much, for almost a year now, and he feared that he was beginning to forget, losing details, slowly losing the sense that Sherlock had been real.

John was suddenly afraid that maybe Ella was right, and all his thoughts and the questions he was asking only served to destroy the very truth of his best friend that he was looking for, the only remainders of which existed in his own memory and heart. Was he effecting the very opposite of what he was trying to do, in the end?


	19. 365

Three hundred thirty-seven days after Sherlock had gone, his voice left John as well.

 

This fact did not register with him at first, enveloped as he was in the cocoon of 221B. One night, a mere week before he would have lived one hateful year without, he woke with a start so intense he was almost on his feet before his brain caught up with the fact that there was no immediate, life-threatening danger. He had not been hearing the voice since the taxi ride home from therapy, three weeks ago.

That’s self-fulfilling prophecy for you. He should never have allowed Ella to... He should...

John tried to calm his breathing but it sounded dangerously close to sobbing still.

Dull with fear, he got up and wandered through the flat, only realising where his feet were taking him when he stood in front of Sherlock’s bed, still unmade. The room still a mess. The shapes in the covers still suggested the possibility of someone sleeping there only moments ago instead of almost a full year.

John’s knees started quivering, and he quickly made his way to the other side. Careful not to disturb the sheets, he lay on the unused edge, staring blindly at the dark ceiling.

Ella’s words started replaying in his mind, proclaiming that it was impossible to call what Sherlock and John had been ‘better’. And maybe she was even right. ‘Whole’ was much closer to what John actually felt: perfect and at peace in some mad - sod it, dependent – way that allowed for each of them to live with their idiosyncrasies, weird quirks and derangements without being alone. John knew without the least remnant of a doubt (since accepting that Sherlock’s sacrifice _did_ mean something), that they could have kept each other whole and happy for... Whole and happy. Period.

And now? There was _nothing_ left of Sherlock, no lingering proof he had ever existed apart from this flat and the clutter he had left behind. Otherwise, his best friend, the man who had cured him from limp and loneliness, could just as well have been a figment of his imagination: a character invented solely to populate John H Watson’s sad blog with a truly fascinating protagonist. People might read about their cases, some day, and assume the stories to be purely fictitious. And John Watson might be remembered as the traumatised veteran who started writing clever detective stories to deal with PTSD...

If he weren’t missing Sherlock so badly, John might have smiled at this idea, and how Sherlock would have snarked at the notion that John could be smart enough to make up their cases and all his brilliant deductions.

He was losing it, John knew, the moment he woke and found himself in Sherlock’s bed with no clear recollection of how he had got there.

All he ever remembered was the painful realisation that the voice had gone: that he had lost it now, too. And this exacerbated the missing and loneliness, making it worse than it had been in a very long time.

* * *

 

received 2011-06-10: Have you stopped eating again? This is a rhetorical question. It means: Eat, or face the consequences.

 

sent 2011-06-10: Piss off – JW

* * *

Ella was standing in front of her practice’s door when John arrived at 11 o’clock, and steered him straight back to the taxi. After that last delightful exchange of texts, his first thought was that Mycroft was making good his threat in some manner.

“It’s time you showed me, John,” Ella said curtly, by way of a greeting and explanation combined.

“Showed you what?”

 

“No flowers?” Ella asked, standing in front of Sherlock’s grave. It was unadorned except for the dark soil covering it. John wished himself anywhere but here, but he was not going to tell Ella how he had not been able to make himself come back here after his visit with Mrs Hudson. He wondered, however, that Mycroft did not pay a gardener to maintain the place.

“He would have hated flowers anyway.” No lie told there.

“And who cares about that? Cemeteries and headstones are for the ones left behind, not the dead. I can’t believe I have to tell _you_ this.”

John’s vision blurred weirdly, as he looked at the dark, well kept soil before him. “Why are we here?”

“You have not come here again, have you? Not since moving back into that _flat_ ,” Ella stated, the last word brimming with contempt. And, of course, completely ignoring John’s question.

“What do you think you are doing, John? For one year now I have watched you stumbling through... well, time, because we can hardly call it a ‘life’, can we? And it’s enough, you have to stop. Walking in the shadows like this is dangerous, and the longer you refuse to return to reality, the more difficult it will be to _ever_ get back. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“You are making it sound like I chose this,” was all John could muster. The sight of the stark black stone was sucking up all his concentration.

“You have.”

John felt too weary to get angry at her. He felt sure he was going to need the little strength left to him later on.

“You already know, don’t you? That you have reached a critical point; that you have to choose. You have been searching, looking, _seeking_ for an understanding so desperately, John.

You already know that _I_ think you were looking for the wrong things but at least you were trying to work through the pain and loneliness! You haven’t found what you need, though, which was what I was trying to warn you about all along. And now you feel you have no option but content yourself with the least common denominator. Right now, it certainly looks like you are giving up...”

“What?” John couldn’t quite follow Ella’s words. But he wasn’t likely to give up on Sherlock, ever, if that was what Ella was saying.

“You were searching for truths where there were none. And when I, or circumstances, or your own mind, left you no choice but to eventually take yourself into account, you simply went with the superficial explanation: the top layers of your own mindscape. You gave up on looking where it _really_ matters.”

At the periphery of his vision he could see, Ella move to stand next to him.

“I know it’s hard. I know it hurts. But if you don’t go into your own heart with the same degree of thoroughness and honesty – self-awareness – that you extended to your analysis of Sherlock Holmes, you will not be able to leave all this behind you. Not ever.”

John’s heart was beating so hard, he could hardly hear his own thoughts. Not that those were many or coordinated.

“You restrict yourself to the most unavoidable, undeniable concessions. Really, if it were not so hard for you, and so alarming, I’d almost call it... amusing, that in _one year_ you have not given me more than an admission of loss, trust and a, yet unexplained, protective urge. All of which, to be honest, were SO obvious from the second you returned to therapy that acknowledging them really should have taken a few weeks at most.

That these notions puzzled you for so long - needed to be fought for - proves that you are avoiding something bigger, an associated knowledge that you believe you cannot face because the cost would be too high to bear.” Ella searched his face for some sign he understood the urgency in her voice.

John was not surprised she did not see it. A numbness, only partly born out of a lack of understanding now, was probably making his face rather blank.

“You speak of ‘loss’ when a blind person could see you are suffering to an extent that is debilitating. You speak of ‘trust’ when it could not be more obvious that you mean _faith_. And admitting to ‘protectiveness’ after all you’ve told me about your friend, yourself, and the two of you together, is so far beneath what you want to express that it’s short of laughable.”

John’s gaze was riveted to the black headstone with the understated gold letters. He concentrated so hard on the lettering that it started swimming, the engraved grooves switching into relief, alternating between the two interpretations his brain constructed.

“John?” Ella was moving closer to him, trying to draw his attention. “Have you got nothing to say?”

He had not. Nothing he wanted Ella or himself to hear.

“Don’t think I can’t see you are getting desperate. It is clear from the way you threw at me that everyone is ambiguous, not moulded after a simple positive or negative; that everyone is more or less indefinable if you care to look closely enough... As if _I_ had ever thought or said differently! I am well aware psychology pretty much follows Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle... It was exactly why I warned you that your unending attempt to find a ‘truth’ in your friend was inevitably futile, and so pathetic to watch, John.”

His head snapped up at Ella’s words, though he still couldn’t move his eyes away from the engraving. _Pathetic_. Thank you.

“And now you feel torn because you have eventually got there, too. Acknowledging the futility of all that you had claimed to have done this whole year, trying to stay close, getting closer to that man... posthumously... must be hard.

But if you do not allow yourself to abandon that focal point of loss and pain, you will never get anywhere else ever again.”

John experienced an increasing sense of detachment from his own body. Which didn’t really make sense since Ella was neither particularly cruel nor telling him anything he didn’t know this time. “Where would I go?” he rasped quietly after a minute, not in response to anything Ella had said, really. Though maybe it was an answer to much that had not been asked...

“That, John, is not the question. You are standing on a one way road, in the middle of nowhere, with only two options. Stand still like you have been trying to do – and I hope you have understood by now that _that’s_ not an option in the real sense of the word – or go forward.” She paused, searching for the next few words. This made John even more uneasy.

“You know, I have puzzled over your _real_ reason for remaining in that shocked, purgatory state of yours. I falsely assumed it was guilt for failing to save your friend.”

A reasonable assumption, John felt.

“Oh, you _do_ feel guilty. Not about what you told me, though. The complexity of the constructions you have surrounded yourself with is astonishing, as I said before. All that, merely to distract yourself from the enormity of what you have lost. What I mean to say is, I know now that it is _not_ , as I assumed at first, these complex distractions in themselves which make it impossible for you to get back to life – but something else, deeply buried by now under the layers of avoidance, denial, and all kinds of... secondary screening mechanisms.”

John’s fingers were beginning to feel numb, which mirrored quite nicely the effect Ella’s talk had on his mind. The analytical, professional part of him was marvelling at Ella’s skill. The woman talking to him now seemed like a completely different person from the obnoxious, abrasive, insinuating, infuriating, scathing therapist he had come to know. She sounded almost contrite today.

“You know there _is_ a reason why, instead of getting better over time, you feel the loss rather more pronouncedly. It is the same reason that tears at you all the time, slowly breaking down your sense of self-preservation. And it does, John. You look like a man waiting for his end.”

End. Black and gold. He would most likely not get as... John lost the wayward train of his thoughts, making himself swallow, dryly. He felt he should come up with some contradiction to Ella’s drama. The problem was, she was correct.

“John.” Ella’s hand on his shoulder returned him to reality, and he found himself sitting on the soft green grass next to the headstone, his trembling fingers digging into the fertile soil. He recoiled as if she had a disease.

He felt sorry immediately; for letting her know just how unbearable he found being touched at the moment.

“My God, are you really so caught up in your own charade world of second guess and misinterpreted truths that you can’t _see_ it?”

Puzzled by her soothing, almost pleading tone of voice, John flattened his hands against the black earth covering Sherlock. It was hard to get his head around the idea that the man was even lying down there, could be contained in a simple wooden box...

“No... You _do_ see it.” Ella muttered, studying him. “You know what you have to do – to say - to leave that place – but you don’t.”

Gods, no... John had wished with all his might that this would not be brought up again – least of all places and times here, and on this day. He should have recognised Ella’s way of doing what he wanted least by now.

“This is not about grief anymore, John. It’s not even about guilt. You’ve had one year to get through them but you seem no closer to peace than before. And it’s not because you don’t know what to think about your friend, even if you keep telling yourself it is. You remember I asked you for this in our first meeting? A year ago?”

John nodded, but that was all she was going to get. He did remember Ella demanding that he say what he ‘had to’; oddly enough he also seemed to remember that back then he had known what she was expecting to hear. But now, he couldn’t for the life of him come up with what she wanted of him.

The silence between them drew out into a breezy, lovely collection of sounds – far nicer than human voices, or most of those anyway. The wind rustled the leaves in the trees’ canopies all over the cemetery, birds calling out and flitting among the gravestones like flecks of colourful life in a place devoted to the memory of the dead.

“One year, John,” Ella repeated. _Not yet_ , he protested. “And you want to stay like this, to go on destroying yourself,” she spat at him, all softness gone, “for this man who-“

“I _don’t_ want this!” John interrupted her, anger flaring at her starting to profane his memory even over his grave. _Least of all Sherlock being dead._ “I’d do anything-“

“Oh, please!” Ella’s voice oozed her customary sarcasm. “That is not true, John.”

“Just because I draw the line at turning on my best friend and hating him for... for who he was?” John was livid.

“No. No, John! You draw the line at admitting to yourself the _one_ thing that could just make it possible for you to understand yourself and continue living. Because you are afraid!”

“I.Am.No.Coward.” John’s voice was deadly.

Ella did not even seem to hear him. “You are so afraid of moving an inch from your place on the torture rack that you can’t even breathe anymore without feeling you might ‘lose’ something of him.” Ella’s hands were suddenly on his face, forcing him to look at her, and allowing her to bore into him with her eyes. “You say you are no coward. And yet you are running from something you are so afraid of that it actually makes you unable to move at all.”

John could not escape her gaze, which was dissecting, unreadable.

“You know what, John? It’s getting pathetic. And I am quite fed up with listening to you deflecting the true issues, playing dumb. Shutting up like this, like a little boy instead of a grown man. Then again, I guess not saying anything is no more ridiculous or pathetic than the way you are mourning on and on for someone who so obviously deserved neither your trust nor your loyalty, who made you into something like his pet-“

Never before had John been _this_ aware of having all his buttons pushed – and still being completely unable to stop himself from reacting. “I said stop that!” he snarled, more loudly than was acceptable in a cemetery.

“Why should I?” Ella asked, with casual contempt. “You just keep lying to me. Acting like you want to go on, claiming you want my help, want to get back to life, while all the time you _do not_ really plan on doing that at all. You are too much of a coward to do the one little thing that will get you out of-“

“I said I would.”  
”John! You don’t even-“ Ella gave an agitated wave of her hand. “You can’t even own up to the _one_ reason for _everything_. For your acceptance of being abused, your enabling your friend’s addictions – and your continued tormented, guilt-ridden existence.” Ella’s voice was furious. And the emotion rushed into John, filling him up, through the connection of their locked gaze, but even more through the words running from Ella’s lips.

“What the fuck _do you want me to say_?” he screeched before he could think.

Ella’s fingers were tracing slowly down to his jaw, but she did not let go of his gaze.

“I loved him?” she retorted softly, without missing a beat.

_Love him_ , John’s mind amended automatically.

John stilled, breathing very carefully, and glad of the moments of precious blankness in his head.

He must not think about that. He _can’t_.

Then the stillness was gone and everything Ella had said rushed at him, her words just now, and all the things he could remember her saying that last year. John’s breathing got shallow as he tried his best to take the last words Ella had said and stuff them back into her mouth, unhear them, make them unsaid. To unthink his own thoughts.

He would not let himself be forced by her into this.

There were sudden, blinding flashes of memories: of kneeling as he was now, his fingers not touching the ground but skin. One year ago... The soil beneath his fingers now was more alive than the flesh back then.

He tried to pull out of the incredibly awkward sensation of being in two places, two moments in time, simultaneously. This was worse than the PTSD had been, he thought vaguely as the blood rushed out of his head, leaving dizziness and the very same feeling of vertigo he remembered experiencing on the sidewalk beside Sherlock’s... beside Sherlock.

He was only marginally aware of Ella hovering over him like a gargoyle spewing forth, from her perceived vantage point, about knowing him, knowing what he needed, knowing what he had to say.

Suffocating on his own breath in front of the cruel headstone, John was vaguely aware that he had not moved, blinked, or swallowed for some time, fighting too hard to keep his thoughts from spinning out of control.

He _needed_ to tell Ella that she was wrong; he fiercely longed to do just that.

And yet he could not make himself say _any_ thing at all.

Not saying something was one thing – denying it was something else altogether.

He had never been able to deny Sherlock anything, had he...

“Won’t you tell him, John? Please?”

“I l-” John’s voice was hardly more than a breath. “I lost him, I failed him, and I...” His words faded with a finality that set John’s skin crawling.

“You are never going to say it, are you.” The disappointment in Ella’s tone gave him a sick, extremely short-lived moment of satisfaction.

“Have you ever considered what your method of dealing with this may have done to your friend?” she went on oblivious to – or completely disinterested in - the white shock that was now spreading on John’s face. “I sincerely hope that you know that saying it might have made a difference, John.”

It was merely the fact that John Watson _did not hit women_ that saved Ella then and there. Beside himself with fury, John let his feet take him away as fast as, and where, they would.

* * *

It was windy up here, the tar warm from the afternoon sun as he sat with his feet dangling over the twenty meter precipice. His slight fear of height seemed to have vanished in its utter insignificance compared to the need to be... close.

Down there, this whole b- all this had started. It was where everything had ended, too.

For quite some time, John let the banality of the place sink in. He was recovering from his long, hobbling walk from the cemetery, one which would surely have been impossible with a real war wound. God, how he hated the power his subconscious had won over him!

The roof of St. Bart’s was nothing at all like the place he had seen in his earlier dreams, with their surreal calm and muted tones. In reality, there was the noise of cars and buses going by on the street below, occasionally highlighted by a screaming ambulance siren. There were also lorries stopping in front of the hospital building to collect laundry and deliver all kinds of supplies.

There was nothing indicating that this roof, or the sidewalk below were in any way special. They were not, he guessed. He let his shaking fingers sink onto the slightly sticky bitumen, feeling the very last spot that Sherlock’s living feet had touched; his heart still stuttering against the wall it had run up against when Ella’s words – the cruellest ones she had ever uttered – shattered the precarious protection it had had before. John knew with absolute certainty that the damage from that crash was the last he would be able to take.

Because, like Ella, he was not entirely sure he’d survive his best friend’s death. How could he survive the loss of someone he loved, or could have loved, then?

Not at all, that was how.

 

After a length of time John would have been unable to specify, the door behind his back shut with a louder than necessary thud. He should have expected it, he supposed. The man always turned up when least wanted, but still always on cue somehow...

That he was even somewhat grateful for the diversion only served to show how fucked he was. And it lent credence to Ella’s assessment that he was a coward, because even Mycroft seemed preferable to having to finally think through her words.

“Enjoying the view, John?” Mycroft enquired, slowly making his way towards John over the flat, unassuming roof. Moving like someone afraid to startle a wild animal...

Staring down at the pavement once more, John considered, for a fraction of a second.

Mycroft stepped close to the ledge and, following John’s stare, peered down with casual disinterest before leaning on his umbrella. He flicked a bit of dust from the lapels of his light, dark-blue suit and reapplied the slightly bored look he had adopted as his default face. The nonchalance seemed forced for once though. John wondered if it was seeing the location of his brother’s death, or John sitting on the ledge like this that did it.

When John didn’t speak, Mycroft turned to face the roof. “There was nothing either of us could have done, John. No one has ever been able to change Sherlock’s mind once he decided on a course of action.” Mycroft sank onto the ledge, keeping a careful distance.

“You... you knew what was going to happen?” he croaked, his voice rusty like he hadn’t used it in years.

Mycroft’s voice sounded detached, as he took some steps into the middle of the roof, then stopped. “That’s where he died.” He caught himself then, and looked back up at John, who had turned to see the spot of Moriarty’s death. “No, I didn’t. Even watching the CCTV records, I couldn’t believe Sherlock would follow through-“

“Th-there’s... footage?” John stammered, perplexed. The mere possibility of ever having to watch Sherlock’s fall again had his stomach rolling.

“John. This is England, and this is Sherlock we’re talking about.” Mycroft reprimanded. “Besides, haven’t you read _any_  newspapers the last few months?”

John scanned for cameras, and found one close to the exit. “So you _did_ know what he was planning.”

“No.” John met the British government’s gaze with narrowed eyes and didn’t believe him. “You know, Sherlock got _exactly_ what he wanted that day. He was _convinced_ that no price was too high to pay to rid society of James Moriarty.”

John nodded abstractedly. As correct as it was irrelevant. “But he did not jump to kill Moriarty, Mycroft. And we both know that. He is dead because... because of me.”

Mycroft rolled his eyes a bit, which John found highly inappropriate coming from someone who enjoyed melodrama so much himself.

“Just because you were on that list, you cannot hold yourself in any way responsible for the decision Sherlock made. Surely you must see that-“

“List?” John had not heard anything beyond that word. A shameful bout of disappointed realisation, followed by instant embarrassment so intense it made his ears burn, coursed through him. Of course, why on earth would he ever assume that his life alone was enough to-

“John. Stop that thought right there.”

For once John did not wonder how Mycroft knew what he was thinking. His features had slid out of control, and he could all too well imagine what they were spelling out for even less skilled observers than a Holmes to see.

“Moriarty knew you would have been enough to exert the necessary pressure – has known that for a long time, and made use of it before. But he had to include a safety or two, in case you extracted yourself from this scheme in some incalcuable way.” Mycroft explained matter-of-factly, almost cheerfully, as if this insight might in some way relieve John.

“How can you be so fucking calm about all of this? I don’t get it! We were both used to kill your brother and you discuss it like it’s some minor inconvenience… Tell me, is there nothing you… I don’t know. Nothing you wish you had cleared up between the two of you?”

The mistake of asking was obvious but John held Mycroft’s gaze stubbornly, and eventually – incredibly - it was Mycroft who caved in, letting his gaze flicker away momentarily.

“Like what, John?” His voice was low-pitched, more like Sherlock’s than usual.

“I... I don’t know...” he deflected, breaking the connection in panic at the question.

“You know, most things were unnecessary to say around my brother. Either because they didn’t interest him, he didn’t understand them, or, of course, because he was well aware of them... What is it you wish you had told him?”

“I...I-I?” he was sputtering and shut his mouth angrily. “Nothing. But I’m not the one who blabbered about Sherlock to Moriarty!“  
Mycroft’s eyes were alarming in their intensity. “Nothing?”

“Nothing that didn’t go into one of those three categories,” he added defensively.

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Mycroft seemed to mutter.

“Sorry?”

“Nothing, John.” Mycroft gave an ironic little twist of his lips and rose suddenly. Gingerly avoiding the spot where Moriarty’s body had lain, he made to leave.

“And, John,” he paused in the door. “I was not.”

“Not what?”

“Used, beyond the fact that I supplied Moriarty with the information he used to discredit Sherlock in the first place.”

“You...“

“No, I was not on that list.”

“Oh.”

Mycroft’s features formed a weird version of… something. “So stop feeling sorry for being one of the very few people who really meant anything to Sherlock. Believe me, it’s harder knowing you were not.”

 

The moon was rising slowly at the far end of the city, almost as if bubbling up from amongst the buildings. 365 days now, John told himself with a look at his watch.

Ella had told him he’d lost his instinct for self-preservation. She had to be wrong though because it was for that exact reason _he_ had not allowed himself to think about that word. The word that had, for months, threatened to pop up in his tired mind each and every time he was not on guard...

He had realised – if he remembered correctly – the moment when that thudding sound of Sherlock’s body hitting the sidewalk ended his world. Being a doctor, John was well aware that he had gone into common shock the second of Sherlock’s fall.

The impossibility of what Sherlock had just been telling him mixed with the events that were unfolding before his eyes – unstoppable, his friend already dead when his feet left the rooftop, even though he was still dozens of meters away from the ground - had congealed into an invisible cloud of dread and numbness.

And right then, even before death had occurred, a new certainty, absolute knowledge, had taken root in John’s heart. It had made him stumble across the street, not seeing a single thing, not even noticing that he went down for a moment – the only thing that mattered was reaching Sherlock and telling him before... Before it was too late.

People told him later, that he had actually talked to them, asking them to step aside, playing his doctor’s role out of sheer reflex. He had no recollection of this whatsoever. He was not surprised to learn that he had collapsed next to Sherlock’s broken, bleeding body, though he could not remember much of this either.

He remembered nothing but the last touch, the last feeling, sticky with blood and the lack of a pulse beneath his fingers which locked around Sherlock’s wrist like they belonged there.

And the second he knew it was too late, that he could not, and now never would, share his sudden knowledge with Sherlock, he thankfully lost consciousness.

That certainty, however, chose to stay with him and was still there when he came to a little while later.

He loved him.

And loving Sherlock was the last thing he wanted to contemplate right then, or ever.

There had been times when it had been difficult enough to share a flat with the man; let alone love him. Imagine loving such a person! Seriously. And what did that even mean, since he was _not_ into men. Never had been. He wasn’t.

But the knowledge was there, and the word - the only one in John’s vocabulary that fit. Maybe love could be a lot of things. He would never find out now.

Worse still, Sherlock would never know anything at all about love.

 

At first he had not let himself consciously think about it, as the loss burnt all too badly, but since the moment he had learnt his real role in Sherlock’s death, the possibility of... _love_ had been unbearable.

John had been telling himself that he was confusing things, emotions. He knew he must be. It was not all that uncommon. Intense feelings resembled each other quite a bit and he had more than enough experience to understand that affection, love, hate and lust could blur at times to one indecipherable jumble of emotional upheaval. It took a lot of effort to separate the strands, if it was even possible. John had usually simply moved on whenever he had reached that point of uncertainty.

Now, though, there was no moving on.

John remembered trying to figure out what kind of... coordination, or alignment, it had been between Sherlock and him, in what way they had matched up so well. (God, that had been just a little after the first month... it seemed a lifetime ago now). And he knew that he had been right that missing Sherlock felt _not_ , as the frequently used imagery implied, like having lost his heart...

_Your heart_ , his memory echoed, so loudly that John glowered at the spot of tar paper where Moriarty had blown his brains out. The double-entendre in the man’s words had not been lost on John, but he hoped it had been lost on Sherlock (who was often ridiculously oblivious to innuendo, so maybe it was not a vain hope). He saw John as his moral guideline, the substitute heart that could sometimes give him useful insight into those emotional, confusing machinations of ‘other’ people: the boring and normal ones. But surely he had not picked up on the second reading of Moriarty’s words. Or had he?

No, it had never felt like he had lost his heart. He wished it _did_.

Missing Sherlock and bearing the awful, too-late knowledge of trust and this still desperate need to protect, as well as the bright-hot pain of failure would all not have been an issue then. Neither would love.

Instead, John thought, this part of him, the metaphorical as well as the physical, was feeling weaker and weaker. As if riddled by holes of regret and pain, slowly ripped into shreds by the passing time. He had tried to stem the flood, possibly making things worse by holding on too tightly at first, only to find that by now he didn’t have enough fingers to cover all the spots his life’s blood was draining from. He knew he needed someone’s help to save this part of him that was unravelling at an increasing speed; but there was simply no one to do it. He was going to dissolve into nothingness, after all.


	20. Mary

Well. How to get down from that roof?

The physical part at least was easy. As the sun made to rise, John eventually took the stairs, slowly and as quietly as possible, hoping no one would notice he had been up there at all. Indeed he was not supposed to be, particularly after what the media called the ‘incident’ last summer. But the door to the roof was one of the hospital’s prescribed emergency exits so the idea of locking it up had been discarded after some discussion. The use of the door was closely monitored now, though, John realised. That might have been how Mycroft had found him. The distraction these mundane and irrelevant musings provided made it possible for John to don a face tired, but showing far less desperation than had been etched into it since before Mycroft’s departure many hours ago.

John arrived on the second floor of the hospital, avoiding the lower part of that particular staircase; the morgue at its end. After flexing his cramped fingers for a moment, he gripped the cane once more and began the long walk down the whitewashed corridor that cut straight through the building.

A year ago at this time, he had been busy falling asleep one floor down from here, in the lab Sherlock customarily usurped. _Sherlock_ had planned to die, had made all the preparations to send John on that fool’s errand to keep him out from under his feet, out of harm’s way. And _John_ had slept… For one surreal moment he saw himself stepping into that lab and finding Sherlock sitting there with that sneer on his face, as if the last year had not been. But the cold dread of seeing another room empty told him it was safer to stay away from the place forever.

“Can I help you, sir?”

John gave the young nurse addressing him a scathing stare to cover up the fact that he had not even noticed her approach.

“Are you lost?”

John nodded absentmindedly and turned, leaving the woman shaking her head at the strange visitor at five in the morning.

 

The only way to keep going, he suddenly saw, with the clarity frequently induced by sleep deprivation, was to stop thinking.

And John managed. He made it home to Baker Street. He made it up the stairs and into the kitchen. Brewed a cup of tea, carried it into the living room without spilling half of it, despite the heavy limp (he was getting really good at coping with that).

He managed not to think, while sitting in the dark room and slowly drinking down the scalding liquid that burned his insides, his throat, right down to his stomach. The pain felt cleansing and he wondered briefly if the heat could cauterise the holes and cuts he felt deep down.

Ella had taught him the incredible power of words before. He was really just awaiting the moment when what she had said, forcing it into the world with sheer brutal force and imbuing it with realness, would catch up with him again.

The moment threatened, for the first time, when John found himself on his feet, finally ready to go to bed. He had a routine by now: going into his room, changing into his pyjamas, lying in his bed for twelve minutes, getting up again to drink a little milk from the fridge, standing in front of Sherlock’s empty chair for three more minutes, staring at the façade of the house opposite through the right living room window... And sneaking into Sherlock’s room, his bed, oh so quietly.

He got no further than the threshold this time.

Because now, it turned out, Ella had made it impossible for him to take comfort in spatial proximity without her words going off in his head like a scatter bomb of unwanted awareness, eliciting _unwarranted_ self-consciousness.

 

That night, John learnt that he needed to change his patterns of behaviour if he wanted to implement a strict regimen of Unthink. His passivity had to lose its conspicuous introspective mania. Instead of indulging in the compulsory, almost catatonic brooding (that had Mrs Hudson plead with him a hundred times), crap telly was running from the second John woke to the minute he went to sleep, on the couch or in the upstairs room. He tried reading (freshly acquired) books on politics or something similarly far out of Sherlock’s range of interest, but found that staring at a page for longer than twenty minutes allowed his thoughts to wander far too easily. Besides, the oddest words, printed on white paper, triggered the strangest reactions in him. So he gave up on reading.

Mrs Hudson, he knew, noticed the change. How could she not? But she never once asked him what had happened on the day that Sherlock had been gone one year. John found this extremely suspicious. Because it was not like Mrs Hudson not to ask “What happened, dear? What did that therapist do now?” and even less like her to stop pestering him about finally going to the cemetery with her. Someone must have told her; there was no other explanation.

Did Mrs Hudson seriously think she was being inconspicuous? Did she expect him not to catch her scrutinising him in the mornings when they drank a cuppa in her kitchen? Did she really think that John wouldn’t figure out that she kept Mycroft informed whether and what and how sufficiently he ate, and where he was at all times? And yes, he _had_  proof of that, because when he ignored his appointment with Ella this time, Mrs Hudson stayed with him pretty much all day, and Mycroft did not put in an appearance.

What John feared most, though, was that his _landlady_ (not his mum, his housekeeper, or his minder) had noticed what he had been doing before; that he had sought out Sherlock’s bed after the voice had left him. Surely she had heard him at night and had drawn her conclusions from that and all he had done and said that year, how he had behaved.

Well, so much for not thinking at all...

He nurtured the anger because being angry was so much better than thinking. _Any_ thing was. His anger at feeling monitored, observed, judged, labelled and… pitied by the old lady grew the longer he resolutely banned the events in the cemetery and on the roof from his mind.

Unsurprisingly, it began seeking release from time to time in him losing his temper. The power of words not only haunted John now, but became his only instrument of defence, as well.

“You know I cared about him like he was one of my nephews, John,“ Mrs Hudson tried one morning, six weeks after he had last seen Ella, Mycroft, anyone. “But you-“

“But I _what_?” John turned on his landlady in a flash, his mind supplying an ending to that sentence that raised his hackles immediately.

“Maybe you have to let go, dear,” she finished her sentence quietly, an almost anxious look in her eyes. John knew she was merely worried about him. But what gave her the right to look at him like that? He was a grown man: he had seen more death and tragedy than this frail old woman could ever imagine. How did she dare talk to him like this? The anger coursed through him, taking away thoughts he would have given anything to delete from his mind.

“I don’t _have to_ do that. Just because _you_ -“

“He would not like to see you like this.”

“Yes, right. Thank you for reminding me. Thank you for pointing out how ungrateful _wasting_  my fucked up life is. Well, being selfless didn’t quite work out the one time he tried, did it?” John didn’t care he was ranting; it felt too good to let the hatred out for once. “He would not be dead if it weren’t for the both of us. Do you even know that?” John stared right through the shock in Mrs Hudson’s blanching face. “Yes, he decided that _he_ couldn’t live with our deaths on his conscience, and I swear he didn’t think for a fucking second if _I_ could, being responsible for his. He was a _fucking_ sociopath, so stop giving me this crap about what he would think, and how he would deal with this. Because he was clever enough to make sure-“

Mrs Hudson stared at him with eyes impossibly wide, two tears making their way down her cheeks. John took a step back and felt himself go pale. Without a word, he fled to take one of those prolonged, aimless walks he had always needed to cool down. He felt like shit. And he was, he knew, for making the old lady suffer in his place, for a single minute.

But he was desperately playing his last hand here, and he simply knew no other way to keep himself together, other than subjecting himself to a strict regiment of _not thinking_. And the last thing he needed (or rather, could stand) was people who made him remember.

It still was not going to work forever, John knew. The reality of Ella’s words had settled in, and it was just too fucking late to never think about it now. His own thoughts on that roof left no room for doubt, after all. No matter what Sherlock said, John Watson was crap at not thinking.

 

Ella had miscalculated. John reached this conclusion, sitting in the light summer rain that had started falling an hour ago. People had drifted from the little park, seeking shelter in the nearby cafes and shops; it was the most peaceful place, enough so that not even memories of Ella could disturb its effect. He thought he understood what she had had in mind that day in the cemetery, what her intentions had likely been. The equation didn’t solve, though.

But then, they _all_ had miscalculated, hadn’t they?

John had never stopped to think what he and Sherlock had until it was too late, never even contemplating the possibility of them coming to an end like this.

Sherlock had surely aimed at a different outcome himself, but had not, in the end, found a way out of the trap Moriarty had so carefully laid.

Mycroft... well. Miscalculation did not cover _his_ disastrous failure.

And Moriarty? John wondered. The man was dead, after all. But why, then, couldn’t he shake the feeling that _he_ was the one who, as Mycroft had so coolly put it, ‘got exactly what he wanted’ that day?

Ella had miscalculated because instead of the catharsis she must have been hoping for, John had put an even closer guard on his heart. Tight enough to seal the holes for now, tight enough to keep him on his feet, and almost tight enough to stop its beating.

 

When he returned to Baker Street hours later, he found the note Mrs Hudson had left on the living room door. John couldn’t even bear to read it. He drowned the tiny little voice remarking that maybe this was for the best: no one who wanted to talk about Sherlock, and no one he could hurt anymore, no matter what stupid thing got into his head next.

* * *

The next morning, John was woken by the ring of the doorbell. Cursing, he fumblingly donned yesterday’s rather rumpled clothes. He cursed a good deal more about Mrs Hudson not opening the door before he remembered why his landlady was absent.

“Yeah, coming!” he shouted, in his best soldier’s training field voice, then hobbled hurriedly down the two flights of stairs, already mightily angry with the day.

“Good morning, Dr Watson. Mary. Mary Morstan.”

She was young, tall, in her early thirties maybe, bright and American. That was as far as John got with his deductions on this unlikely presence before their door. She thrust her hand out and the reality of her shocked him into motion.

If she was at all aware of the incredibly cluttered state of their – John was stubbornly sticking to his use of possessive determiners – living room, she hid it well.

“It’s John, p-please,” he told her, fighting down the impending embarrassment about his stutter, and settled in his chair when she had sunk onto the couch. “Wh-what brings you here, Ms Morstan?”

“Mary.” She pondered his question, her clear brown-green eyes skimming the things behind John’s back before returning to his face. “You’ll probably think it a waste of your time but I really don’t know who to turn to.”

Intrigued despite himself, John leant forward.

“I don’t know anyone here in London, you see. Well, all my friends live over in New York...” She interrupted herself, giving a small, self-deprecating smile. “If you could spare a few hours tonight, it would just be great if you’d agree to accompany me to a... meeting.”

“I’m s-sorry, I don’t understand.”

“You _do_ take clients, don’t you?”

He stared at her, unable to conjure a single response for several seconds. “Erm.”

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” she stuttered, her words falling over themselves. “You don’t! I...”

Moved into action by her sudden discomfort, John tried to calm her with a gesture.

“Why don’t you t-tell me wha-what all this is about? Who t-told you to come here?” _Has someone sent you to Sherlock? Maybe someone who did not know?_ John really looked at her face for the first time now. She was not beautiful in the common sense of the word. Not delicate enough for conventional tastes, he guessed.

“I have to meet a man tonight, and I’d rather not go alone. But, as I said, I have no male friends, or even acquaintances I could turn to in London.” John found he was rather glad to hear this. “A friend of mine suggested that I explain my situation to you since you’ve worked for all kinds of clients before.”

“Who?”

“Dr Molly Hooper,” she told him with a little smile. John was dumbstruck at hearing Molly’s name pop out of nowhere. There had been no fall-out between them: there had been just nothing, and it had been stinging him for quite some time. At the funeral, Molly had been surprisingly composed. John would have expected her to... never mind. He was sure he had not met the expectations of the people attending either: numb, silent and dry-eyed as he had suffered through the entire thing.  
They had met once afterwards, but something was off about her. She was... wrong. It made John wonder if that was how other people saw _him_. Changed, not the same person as before.

He had been under the impression that they got along well, John taking Molly’s side because he liked her and trying every now and then to shield her from the brunt of Sherlock’s uncaring manner and scathing words. Now Molly seemed unable to even _look_ at John. They found nothing to talk about, and she fled the room almost as soon as possible. It was like John could see a version of his own guilt mirrored in her eyes.

Suddenly, he became aware that Mary Morstan was speaking again. “S-sorry. You were saying?”

A little smile drew up one corner of her mouth. “I just explained that Molly and I met some years ago at uni. I was over here for a semester to take some courses offered in collaboration with St. Bart’s.”

 

An hour later, John found himself standing before his drawer, staring down at the item he kept locked away there. It bothered him, this ‘an hour later’... on day four hundred six. He shook his head and resumed his pondering. Take it or leave it? John’s hand hovered for a little while longer, shaking almost imperceptibly. He would be unable to hit a target, he supposed. Then again, if anything really bad happened, he just might.

Waiting turned out to be something he had very much forgotten how to do. He used to be very good at it, he remembered. But for more than one year now he had done the exact opposite of waiting. Was there even a word for that?

Settling into his chair opposite empty space, he recounted to himself what Mary Morstan had told him. For the past nine years she had been getting anonymous money transfers to her account. At first she had naturally assumed it was a mistake, but her bank had assured her that her name and account number had indeed been the intended recipient. Her subsequent attempts to ascertain the money’s origin had all failed. And so she had continued receiving considerable amounts of money two, sometimes three times a year.

God knew, John thought, he could very well do with those deposits himself. He winced, remembering Mrs Hudson’s off-hand remark wondering when Mycroft Holmes was going to stop paying for Sherlock’s half of the rent. John had not been spending much of his pension (sitting at home was at least one thing: cheap) but it did not cover rent, insurance, and the bare necessities of life even then. He had promised to look into finding a job…

No, concentrate. Mary’s story (and don’t you _dare_ think ‘case’). Two days ago, she had suddenly received an email from someone who claimed to be her unknown benefactor, asking her to meet him. At a neutral place, at night, asking her not to bring the police – allegedly in her own best interest… It was rather ridiculous, like something out of a cheap novel, Mary had pointed out.

But John was not so sure it would turn out to be harmless. With the realisation, instead of excitement, he felt dejected. He wasn’t up to anything like this. Not in any way.

So, like he had done every minute since Mary Morstan had left the flat, John doubted the wisdom of his decision.

But he still didn’t have it in him to watch anyone do stupid, possibly dangerous things all by themselves, not if there was the slightest chance he could help. Which was exactly what had brought him to this point in life, wasn’t it?

  

They left Baker Street on time, and during their short taxi ride John couldn’t help but notice a weird buzz of nervous energy emanating from his... well, companion. She stared out of the side window, silently taking in the fast-changing, nightly view of London for a minute. It would all still be new to her, of course. How long had she been here now?

Mary Morstan had not volunteered any more information other than the bare facts of this night’s meeting, and John was aware of a strange division inside himself. He knew he should, and in another time _would_ , ask her about her background, her profession and why she was in London, and if she had any ideas about her anonymous supporter, but he found himself tongue-tied again, exactly as he had been that morning. He was not completely sure why.

When she turned away from the window, smiling apologetically, he was struck by the thought that she was the first person he knew who would not compare him _now_ to him _then_. And maybe that was what made deciding how to act so difficult.

That was the moment Mary Morstan politely enquired: “Afghanistan or Iraq?”

Her eyebrows drew together; his face must have been alarming. “I’m sorry. Have I said something wrong?”

John knew he must seem an absolute lunatic to her by now. “N-no.”

“Molly just mentioned-“

“Afghanistan.”

Sensing his unease (and most likely attributing it to entirely the wrong reasons) Mary apparently decided that small talk was not something for this evening, or maybe this oddball of a companion, and resumed staring out of the window.

Since he could not come up with a way to correct her unfavourable impression, John let himself drift along with the silence until they arrived at their destination a few minutes later.

 

The evening turned into a series of surreal events from there. Far from the surreptitious, clandestine meeting with a dark clad figure, wearing an obviously fake moustache and an artificial bald patch, that John had been half expecting by now, there was a young man in his late twenties (pale, very light blond, watery eyes – clearly OCA, he automatically diagnosed, probably OCA2) sitting on the front steps of the theatre. He must have been chain smoking for some time, as he had collected quite a number of stubs, which he picked up solicitously when he saw the two of them approach.

“You Dr. Morstan?” he enquired of Mary. “And who’s that?”

“John Watson.” Dispense with the title for now. Doesn’t have to sound like they were on some sort of congress.

The young man eyed him for a second, like the name might ring a bell. But then shrugged. “You’re not a police officer, are you? Okay, let’s go then.”

“And what is your name?” Mary asked, rather shortly.

Without a word, he turned around and set off at a slow pace. Not that John was going to complain, damn his leg. They followed the stranger first in the direction of Covent Garden, then burrowed deeper into the city’s warren of side streets, and John felt oddly reminded of the White Rabbit. Only there was no Wonderland at the end of the journey. Not at all.

 

Mary Morstan was looking less inclined to keep following the man by the minute, when they were finally led into a rather nondescript little Indian cafe. Once he had picked a table, their odd host sank down with the careful movements of a much older man. Finally able to see the face of both his cl- _companion_ and the mysterious host, John tried to observe anything of interest.

“So? What is this?” Mary glared at the waiter appearing at their table before she got an answer. “You wrote you wanted to talk to me, about that money I was sent all these years…?”

Finally, the man seemed to have brought his thoughts back on track. His fingers (stained yellow badly, as was his white hair in places) twitched for a cigarette, but as Sherlock had pointed- John drew an angry breath.

“Yes. Yes, we have to.”

“We?” John prompted.

“My name is Tad Sholto, my brother and I have to talk to you about something. Although _he_ doesn’t see it that way, I’m afraid,” he began, and followed up with an extraordinary tale.

Tad and his twin brother, Bart, had recently lost their father, John Sholto. Yes, the head of Sholto Security, the largest private security company in the country. On his deathbed, John Sholto kept talking about a lot of strange things (the stroke had addled his mind as well as slurred his speech), but one name that had come up time and again during the dying man’s mumblings, was Jack Morstan.

“What... what has my _father_ to do with any of this?” Mary asked, suddenly white in the face.

“I have no idea.” The young man grabbed his cigarettes with a good deal more force than they could endure. “I was not there all the time. My father… I only heard part of what he told my brother.”

The sentence was enough to suggest a cornucopia of bitter sibling rivalry. John did his very best not to let himself be dragged away into his own memories.

“But there was some connection. An… association between our fathers.”

“What do you mean, ‘association’?” Mary flared, sensing (as did John) that Tad Sholto put an odd stress on the word.

Tad Sholto kneaded the little pack with bony fingers. “I do not know-“

“But you have got an idea, haven’t you? And one you don’t like very much,” John accused.

“When we went through Father’s papers, we found no mention of the name Morstan: neither in the business records, nor his private ones. With one exception. Our father, we found, owned a very… discreet bank account on Mauritius. Neither Bart nor I had known of it before, and its only purpose seems to have been transferring money. To you.”

Mary Morstan was still rather pale, although John had no idea what about the whole thing could have been this distressing.

“And now you want me to return the money to you?”

“Gods, no.” Tad seemed honestly shocked at the suggestion. “No.”

“What do you want, then?”

“You see, there was something else Father kept repeating, mostly when the name Morstan came up, too.”

“What?”

“The Treasure.”

 

It was not much. Tad Sholto steadfastly claimed that he knew nothing more, but admitted that he suspected something not quite legal behind the whole affair. Mary Morstan had not said a word since they left the café, and John would have bet she knew more about what might be going on than she let on. He could hardly ask her about it now, though.

They agreed to accompany Tad to the family’s estate in the city, only a little walk away, where Bart Sholto was currently living, to try and persuade him to share what else the late John Sholto had told him about the mysterious treasure.

Turning into Pondicherry Street they saw an ultra-modern, fancy villa mostly built of glass and steel behind a high (incongruously) classical iron cast fence and gate. The camera came as no surprise. If you owned a security firm, you would be the first to have that kind of thing, John assumed.

But Tad’s comment indicated that might not be the case. The young man glowered at the appliance. “The Major turned quite paranoid in his last few months.”

“The Major?”

Tad blushed a bit. “It was our father’s nickname. From back when he was in the army.” He led the way towards the main entrance. “He hardly left the house anymore, and he was always watching out for limping men. It was quite unsettling to see him… well, lose his grip on reality.”

The hallway was what you’d expect of a house like this. Shining, dark marble tiles on the floor. Lighter shades of the same materials on the walls. Light sources scattered over the ceiling and along the walls. Very expensive. Very cold. And very empty.

“Are you sure your brother is at home?”

Tad frowned, nodding. “Yes, he told me he would be. He’s probably upstairs in his suite. _Right. Suite. No wonder they don’t mind Mary keeping the money_.

The hall opened to a staircase with a stained-glass skylight, two stories up. “The door on the left leads to my brother’s rooms, the other one to our father’s.”

“And where do you live?” Mary asked. She seemed to feel uneasy, keeping rather close to John’s elbow now.

“Surely not here,” he replied. He knocked at the dark heavy wooden door leading to Bart Sholto’s suite. There was no answer.

“Oh, Mr Sholto! Thank god you’ve come!” a high-pitched voice screamed.

John jerked around, instinctively shoving Mary behind himself.

“Mrs Ikram. You gave us quite a fright,” Tad scolded the old woman standing at the foot of the stairs, in the basement.

“Sorry, sir. Sorry. But Mr Sholto, your brother! Something is not right with him, I’m sure, sir. He has not had dinner tonight, and I knocked and knocked. No sound, sir. I fear-“

While Tad tried to calm the old woman, John assessed the door. Solid oak, from the look of it. A serious lock to it, too. Rather unusual for a door inside an already well secured building. He would ask Tad about that later.

“Is there a second key?”

“Not here. I think one is kept in our father’s safe in the company headquarters up in Enfield.”

“Any other way we can get inside then?”

“Unless you can climb glass walls, no.” Tad answered after a moment’s thought. He returned to stand next to John, then suddenly dropped to one knee. “Maybe I can see something through the keyhole… The lights are on, he-” The words died on his tongue, and his breath caught.

“What is it, Sholto?” John pushed the unresponsive young man aside and took a look himself. It took him merely a second to detect what Tad Sholto had noticed. On the right edge of his field of vision, on the wide, shining expanse of another marble floor, were the two legs and two feet of someone lying prone on his back.

 

Everything that happened then turned into mush in John’s memory. He knew that shooting open a door was not half as easy as it looked on telly (where even metal doors gave way after two shots at most). Once he had ordered the housekeeper, Tad, and Mary out of the staircase, he tried, nonetheless, shielding his face with his left arm so he wouldn’t risk blinding himself with the splinters hissing through the air after each bullet. It took him four to do enough damage to the lock to make forcing their way in possible. Together with Tad Sholto, they shouldered the thing open on the second go.

Tad was, unsurprisingly, faster inside, running to his brother’s side in a flash, cowering over his still form. John followed close behind, and for the first time since… in a very long time, his doctor’s persona, ingrained as it was, asserted itself without any intention on his part.

“Tad, step away from him. I’m a doctor, let me-”

A loud buzzing noise filled his ears, when he suddenly saw it: the head bent at an impossible angle in a pool of congealing blood, light, unseeing eyes staring through him. Bile rose in his throat, and all he managed was to take a step backwards, colliding hard with Mary Morstan, whom he had completely forgotten.

He felt his bad knee slide out from under him, and when she tried to steady him, he fought her grasp off roughly and let himself sink down onto the cold tiles, dry-heaving.

A few minutes later, when his senses returned, he wished nothing more than for the earth to open up and swallow him. He had never made more of a fool of himself, had he?

Mary had taken control of the situation in the meantime, ordering Tad out of the room, and John could hear him cry, while the housekeeper talked soothingly. She had also called the police already, and now she stood at a slight distance, unsure whether or not to approach him.

“I’m sorry,” John squeezed out eventually.

Mary hummed wordlessly, but came to stand closer to him, and offered him a hand to stand up.

“Are you… are you all right?” he asked.

She gave him the universal look of unimpressedness, and John braced himself for the sight and forced himself to take another look at Bart Sholto’s body. Whether it was indeed the attempt to collect information and find out anything about his death, or rather to prove a point to himself (and maybe a little bit to Miss Morstan as well), John was not sure. And it did not matter much because the cavalry arrived at the scene right then.

 

Within a minute, the place swarmed with people. The housekeeper wailed outside when someone insisted that she give a statement. Tad Sholto was separated from the rest and taken someplace else. And then, the furious figure of Sergeant Sally Donovan filled the door.

“I don’t fucking believe this. What _idiot_ shoots a door down like this?” she demanded of someone outside of John’s view. “A witness? What witness?”

And with that, she strutted onto the crime scene as she liked to do, her pointy nose high in the air – stopping dead when she saw John.

“Tell me that’s not true! What the hell are _you_ doing here?” No pleasantries, then.

“Same old,” John couldn’t help snark back.

“Did you ruin my crime scene, John Watson?”

“Excuse me. We were trying to get to the victim to help him. I am _so_ sorry if that interferes with-“

“Freak rubbed off on you, didn’t he? Can’t you just take your dates to the cinema? Must it really be crime scenes?”

“I’m not his date,” Mary chipped in. John stared at her for a fraction, caught in an odd feeling of déja-vu.

“No. Of course you’re not,” Donovan sneered in agreement. “Stupid of me.”

John’s gaze darted back at the sergeant at this remark, not sure what he had heard.

“But you surely have a statement to give, as well, Miss. Johnson?” she called a young officer who stood shuffling his feet at the door, avoiding a look at the body. John watched them both leave the place of Bart Sholto’s death with envy.

“So. What are you doing here? And don’t even try to tell me it’s coincidence.”

“I’m not telling _you_ anything.”

Donovan barked a laugh. “Figures. I knew you’d not forgive me for being right to warn you.”

“For-” He could feel something come loose in his head. The instant hate Sally Donovan evoked was astonishing. And hell, he did have to settle an outstanding score with her. If she insisted on doing this here, John couldn’t care less. “Yes, of course. You were right all along, weren’t you, _Sally_?” John spat at her, deliberately misunderstanding what she was referring to. “Only you were standing around _two_ bodies Sherlock put there; his own, plus that of the most dangerous criminal in the world, one that you lot were utterly incapable of getting your hands on.”

“It’s interesting you’re saying it like that. Could have been my words.”

It took John a shocked minute to realise that Donovan was alluding to exactly what he thought he had heard in her voice.

“What are you talking about, Donovan? You know he was framed. Can’t bear the thought you got it all wrong?”

The sergeant gave a fake, high-pitched laugh. “There is so much weird about the circumstances of the Freak’s death that that’s neither here nor there.”

“Are you mad? There’s... there’s evidence!” For the first time John was sorry for not knowing what, exactly, it was.

Donovan’s face regrouped into an ungraceful sneer. “Oh, yeah. Right. The video. The ominous voice recording...” She was fully facing him now, her feet set apart and her hands on her hips. “So tell me, he recorded all of this for what reason? Why gather all this – circumstantial – evidence of his innocence, and then jump? It does not make any sense. Unless you want to tell me Sherlock Holmes was suicidal for feeling misunderstood and misjudged. Like he ever gave a shit what anyone thought.”

So they had still not figured out about the killer. _Killers_ , John corrected. “Ignoring you does not mean he did not respect anyone’s opinions.”

“Right, because he valued your input ever so much. Gosh, John, listen to yourself.”

“You-“ he rasped, and wondered later where that sentence could possibly have gone. Somewhere that might well have cost him a considerable sum, he guessed.  
“Oh my. You were right: same old, isn’t it. I know they say nothing but good things about the dead but well... I’m not the religious type, I’m afraid.

You know, what I particularly do not like is that rules were bent around Sherlock Holmes, all the time. You hit the chief-superintendent, and you walked away, ‘hostage’,” she painted the quotation marks into the air with her fingers, “of a man who had just stolen a gun and fled from being arrested. Ever hear of that again? And it didn’t stop with his death. I mean, you were there, you saw him jump, apparently. And yet you were never interrogated.”

John stared at her. He had never thought about any of that.

“No matter that two men had died under unclear circumstances, one of whom claimed to be threatened by the other, claimed he had been impersonating a criminal for money. None of that mattered because it was Sherlock the Freak Holmes...” She puffed out an exasperated breath.

“But Moriarty was real. You found evidence of that yourself!”

“Oh, yes. We did. It’s only... You see, John, no matter what else he was, I know full well that Sherlock Holmes was a goddamn genius. And vain to a fault. So I can’t say that I trust that evidence all that much. And seeing how he killed himself when there was really no need anymore, the only explanation that makes any real sense, if you are honest, is that by killing himself, he wanted to add the ultimate proof for the tale. We both know he’d rather die the Byronic hero than let himself be exposed as a fraud.”

The worst thing about it was that John absolutely could not debate the accuracy of that. Sherlock _did_ risk his life to prove he was clever. And he _would_ have died to prove he was cleverer than Moriarty. Only, he hadn’t. “Great. So no matter what evidence you find that does not support your theory, you just conclude it was planted by Sherlock beforehand, because he was a ‘goddamn genius,’ but at the same time, you maintain that he was not clever enough to have solved all those cases the way he claimed to.”

She stared at him for a moment. “You can see it like that if you want. It’s not like you were ever rational when it came to Sherlock Holmes, is it?”

“But you are? Seems like the fact that he’s dead is good enough for you to denounce him now. Or is it just that you’d rather not face the fact that _you_ were the first to swallow Moriarty’s fucking bait?” John did not even feel his conscience object to implying that betrayal had made Sherlock jump. Not when it came to Sally Donovan.

“I swallowed the bait? Is that so? But you sucked up the Freak’s each and every word. Among other things, I imagine.”

_Yeah, do that, ‘cause imagining things seems to be about all you are good at._ That was the retort it deserved. But rage at her gross vulgarity took John by surprise, so what came out instead was “Shut the fuck up.” John was in her face before she finished the sentence, his hands clamped around her upper arms with enough force to make her squeal. He shoved her towards the wall for good measure, wiping his sweaty palms and fingers on his pants.

And of course that didn’t help matters at all.

“Sergeant Donovan! What is going on here?” Lestrade appeared at John’s side, taking in the scene with one glance. And surely he had heard Donovan’s last words, too. No surprise on his face, though. Letting his gaze wander to the room behind Lestrade, John caught a _number_ of people staring at him. Whispers were audible, directed mostly towards those who didn’t already know who he was. John could see surprise and calculation in their eyes.

God, was that what they had _all_ been thinking the whole time?

Of course they had. After all, _that_ was what loads of people assumed before, anyway. Why would they have stopped with Sherlock’s death?

And when had any of them taken his protestations to the contrary seriously?

John felt the regimen of Unthink slip from his grasp.

“John? John!” Lestrade was steering him away, and John shrugged his hands off.

“What?”

The DI nodded towards the woman who had been standing just outside the door to the suite, apparently absentmindedly observing the proceedings. “Would you please take Miss Morstan home?”


	21. Egg-shells / Reflections

“You think I was being cruel.” Ella’s words reached out through the palpable coldness that filled the room, maybe more than it ever had before.

More minutes passed, but Ella did not expand; her eyes remained calmly fixed on John while he struggled to adapt. Finding anything to say seemed harder than ever, for a great many reasons that John had ever greater difficulty keeping apart and identifying with certainty.

“Y-you were _wrong_ ,” he said eventually.

Ella raised an eyebrow. Seeing the small change in facial expression, John felt the familiar anger quiver beneath his layers of control. This look was the perfect manifestation of the absolute certainty with which she kept scrutinising his life, and picking it into pieces that didn’t seem to match up at all anymore.

“ _No m-matter_ what I would have said that-that day, Sherlock-“ He began, had to stop for a moment; to rephrase and ban the uncertainty that he could feel creeping up his throat. “It would _not_ have made a difference,” he declared, his voice betraying the rage he had stowed away so carefully before coming here today. To his surprise, he managed to shut his

mouth before more started tumbling out.

In fact, John had realised that, blended with the shock at Ella’s words in the cemetery, there was hurt there, too (as the last weeks had proven beyond the shadow of a doubt) that he couldn’t quite fathom. Despite all his Unthink, he _had_ been... not thinking about it, but it had fermented in his subconscious. What if Ella was right? Could it possibly _have_ made a difference if he had – no, that was ridiculous, because he (unlike Ella!) knew why Sherlock had jumped, and it would not have been helped by _anything_ John might have said.

His insides - all right, his _heart_ \- didn’t seem to follow his head in this, though. It insisted that he should have done, should have tried _any_ thing; certainly more than he had: gaping dumbly, too surprised by the sudden turn of events to come up with anything better than stuttering, disbelieving nonsense.

“W-what you d-did was not helping,” he found himself telling her, in the treacherous, seductive void that Ella had let build through her silence.

“You chose not to do what I asked you to,” Ella retorted lowly. Almost sounding disinterested. “So how would you know?”

He had fortified his realm of Unthink to the best of his abilities, but since the crime scene, he was aware that it was standing on feet of clay.

That damned crime scene... _Damn Mary Morstan_ , he thought savagely. _And fuck Donovan and the Yarders and Ella’s crap psychology-_

“You t-take everything from me,” John rasped. “Now I can’t even _remember_ him anymore without thinking about-“ He never finished the reference, but Ella understood well enough, he saw. “I lost him, and now you all are making sure that I can’t even keep the least little bits I have left. Nothing. I can’t read, I can’t watch shows I’ve liked since I was a boy, I can’t even look at the newspapers,” he listed, in icy, clipped tones, not caring that this couldn’t possibly be making much sense to Ella. “I can’t even surf the fucking Internet, I can’t bring myself to wear the grey jumper or the striped one, I can’t go out anywhere, I-I can’t go into his room,” he admitted, and stopped, feeling his ears burn at the omission. “You’ve made me lose _any_... connection to him that I still had. _Have_. Fuck. And if you really think that is what you should be doing, you _are_ wrong!”

Ella’s mien was entirely unreadable. Or was it?

Mistrust made his voice very low, as he continued. “You’re having a field day, aren’t you? You wanted exactly this all along, right? From the start, your foremost aim was making me _forget_ , that was why you wanted me to leave Baker Street. It’s why you-“ John felt something dangerous scratch at the edge of his awareness and recoiled. “You want me to... erase him from my memory.” A forced abscission; and as surely as he knew that it hurt like hell, he just couldn’t rule out the possibility that this might save his life, in the long run.

And how he hated Ella for _that_.

He added in a whisper, “You want me to de...delete him.”

His therapist stared at him for a moment as if he had grown a second head. “John. Have you ever considered dealing with my words in the cemetery instead of finding ever new ways _not_ to?”

Yes. No. John was too confused by his own words to take this as anything but a rhetorical question. Why was it that he only seemed to see through things when he was fighting with Ella, and rarely in the solitude of the flat? Maybe the regimen of Unthink that Ella had _forced_ him to install was an even more two-edged thing than he had already begun to suspect.

“I _never_ once told you to forget, John. On the contrary, really!” She thought for a moment. “You are this angry with me because you hold me responsible for your inability to work through the _correctness_ of what I said, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“That is unworthy, both of your friend and of yourself, because that inability will indeed render you unable to keep memories. Yet that was neither my intention, nor is it in any way necessary. You can keep all the memories you like, as long as you’re aware that they _are_ memories, but my job is to help you find a way to live. What you call memories is hanging around your neck like a millstone. And you _know_ it, don’t you?”

“You want to hear what I know?” Had the woman even listened to a single thing he had told her, about Sherlock and him? “I probably shouldn’t be saying this to you, I know, but it damned well feels like _you_ are not helping me at all, but doing your best to keep me ill!”

“Now, that’s projecting!” Ella almost laughed, her face displaying neither shock nor anger. “And isn’t that your favourite technique to avert attention from painful things?”

“ _I am not paying attention to the painful things?_ ” John was aware that he was too close to snapping. Instead of Ella, he saw flashes of Donovan’s sneering face. He clamped his mouth shut and took himself down a notch. “You’re right: no one could get the idea that _you_ might not be focussing on the _painful things_.“

Ella threw her hands up at that, but couldn’t get a word in.

“I’m fed up with this!” John was seething with anger now, the major part of it fed by the sudden, vivid memory of the incident with Donovan. And the sickening visit to NSY the next day. “I’m fed up with everyone telling me what to do, watching me with those condescending eyes, like they know oh-so-well what is the matter with me. I _hate_ you all for pitying me, all the while neither caring nor believing what I say. You may be the worst of the lot, but you’ll no doubt love to hear that half the fucking Yard is making up their own stories, as well.”

“Oh. I see.” Ella said, softly. “It’s not me you’ve been going on about at all, is it?”

Why couldn’t he keep his stupid mouth shut?

“What happened, John?”

John stared at his hands. They looked oddly foreign, with their blue veins, and the nails broad against the bony fingers now. The uselessness of it all...

“I tried _doing_ something,” he whispered. But that was not the crucial point, so he admitted, “I’m too stupid not to.” And he told her. About Mary Morstan. About the non-case. About the dead man. Sergeant Donovan. He told her about the blood on the black and white marble tiles.

Ella said nothing. The clock ticked by, five minutes.

.

“You know, from the minute you turned up today, I wondered what had made you come back. Just to say I was wrong? And we’ll still have to be sure about what, exactly, anyway.”

About _everything_. But that wasn’t true, was it...

“I know now. But I wonder if you do.” She took his silence as a no, apparently. “That encounter with life - the life that goes on around you, regardless – scared you to death.

You feel like you’re cheating on a dead man, John.”

John stared.

He tried to think past his first instinct of denial.

He did feel guilty, _and_ it was relieving.

Because who was he to dabble in this sort of thing? And he could not possibly…

Because he was here, and Sherlock…

“ _Not_ the way you think,” he croaked, finally.

Ella’s crooked smile was more sad than mocking.“Ah. It’s brilliant, that you seem to believe you _know_ what anyone thinks, still. Can you not appreciate the irony of that? Tell me, are you more angry about what that sergeant said, or about it not aligning with your imaginary world?

That’s what happens when you remove yourself from reality for this long, this thoroughly.”

Ella didn’t understand _anything_ , obviously.

“Since his suicide, you have been living very carefully, like you were walking on egg shells, too afraid to take a single step that might mean there was a life apart from grief and guilt.

And now you wonder what the hell got into you, why the hell you let yourself be drawn into Mary Morstan’s case. Tell me, did you even take a single step outside of your flat since? Or have you locked yourself up?

You would shut the door into Mary Morstan’s face if she came to you today, wouldn’t you? Even though - What am I saying? _Because_!- you liked her, and although she asked you for help in an obviously very serious matter, you have already shut her out again, leaving her to deal with the police and everything else on her own. That woman must be hoping to learn more about her father’s role, now that this Sholto character brought him into the picture. Have you even _spoken_ to her again?”

John could do nothing but stare in shamefaced realisation.

“You withdrew yourself from reality again, just like that. And why? Have you got any explanation for that? No? Well, since you have made it clear that you do not trust me anymore to act in your best interests, or never have, I’ll just give you a piece of my mind:

You _do_ feel like you are cheating on your friend, in about a thousand guilt-related ways. But most of all you feel bad about forming a new bond with _anyone_. You are also doing your best to sever those you still have.

So, the mere _possibility_ of letting someone in makes you run and hide.” Ella threw him a fierce glare. “And don’t you tell me now, you were not doing exactly that, John Watson. You are trying to exclude anyone that is not Sherlock Holmes from occupying those parts of your heart – oh, excuse me, your _memory_ \- that you know full well are slowly running empty.”

Empty. Yes, he could hardly argue with that.

“What you cannot forgive yourself for, most of all, is exactly that. You accuse me of being the reason, but you feel that it’s _you_ , yourself, that are losing the remnants of your friend. Effects he had on your life are lessening, memories are bleeding out -,” John winced at the word - “ _time_ is levelling out the impressions he made on the substance of your life. You think that is a new reason to feel guilty? You need to get this into some perspective, John. You’ve spent eighteen months...”

“Five hundred-one days,” John breathed over her words, too low to be heard.

“...with the man. You have lived _forty years_ without him before,” she pointed out. “So, honestly, the _only_ one here who works, and really hard at that, to keep you in your current state is _you_. Though you should ask yourself... How much is this still _you_ , John?”

* * *

Of course, John had known he was in a dark place for a long time.

But for the first time now, he thought he was able to actually make out the crossroads Ella kept talking about, even though her analogy might not be entirely accurate. Not so much a crossroads as a tunnel of swirling chaos, a bit like a chimera of a vortex and a crashing wave. All he could do was try and reach its end before he would be swallowed up whole. He could see the world outside, hazy and distorted in places, but he was not able to connect to it from here.

It was not all that different from his state of mind after Afghanistan.

The idea of Sherlock Holmes giving anyone orientation was absurd, but he had, then. Even if people only ever noticed the effect the other way round.

John steered his thoughts forcefully off that course, concentrating on what had brought him here right after leaving Ella’s practice.

He could deny a _lot_ of the things Ella had said, but there was no arguing that she was right about one thing: He was not at all like himself anymore. Not in the sense that Molly wasn’t herself, but much more fundamentally. He had never been one to put himself at the centre of _any_ thing; but this last year, he had not done anything but that. The memory of how he had treated dear old Mrs Hudson at times, and their row, made him nauseous with shame. He had not seen anyone’s pain but his own. He had seen _nothing_ beyond that.

Unthink might help him keep himself together, but it was also another puzzle piece in the destruction of who he had been. The idea of continuing an existence in which he would progressively be less and less able to recognise himself was unbearable. So, what now?

The despair that clawed in his chest made him press the heels of his hands against his eyes for a moment.

“Roses, Dr. Watson?”

He turned around a bit sheepishly, meeting the kind eyes of the girl working at the little flower shop around the corner from their flat. It was obvious she had not posed the question for the first time.

“N-no. Something like that,” he said, pointing at a middle-sized, understated bouquet on display.

Joan eyed him curiously for a moment. “It’s not for your girlfriend, is it?” she asked a bit hesitantly.

“No. It’s not.”

 

It was neither the flowers, nor John’s grovelling that swayed her. The flowers went into Mrs Turner’s hands, and from there to a vase, the very moment John handed them to his resolute landlady. His apologies were met with a serious nod, as was his promise to call Mike, or even Sarah, that same day to find a job again.

“And now you must explain to me what you were going on about; Sherlock...” she drew herself up straighter. “Sherlock doing that horrible thing for _us_.”

* * *

Had he needed any more proof of how fucked up he was, he thought, those two days since the night at the Sholto villa would already have given it to him.

The surge of adrenaline that _doing_ something, and the confrontation with Donovan, had caused ebbed into the most empty feeling he had ever known. He had sat in Baker Street, and done precisely nothing as hard as he could, letting the nothingness seep into him.

When it did not have the same calming effect it used to have, he had finally had to accept that he had lost too many bits and pieces of the past, of Sherlock, already, and that the picture of them was falling apart for good.

Time. Was it really time that was doing this? John wondered. The healing properties of passing time were not something he had much reason to take seriously. On the other hand, the most fleeting moment could-

Still, Ella was right. They had known each other for no more than five hundred and one days. And John had lost a good many friends before. Hell, he had lost _more_ than friends. Why _did_ this feel so different, then? What sent him into a panic _this_ night, sitting on the living room floor with his back to Sherlock’s bedroom door, thinking about time, was not the time of his life that he had effectively lost; more than a year, and it seemed much more time than that, and much less, simultaneously... It was the knowledge that years _and years_ of this were still to come.

 

Besides the properties of time, John thought about contacting Mary Morstan. He really did. He did not have her number, but since they had shared a taxi from the crime scene, and she had got off before him, he knew she was living close to the university, in an old, slightly run-down Victorian building that had been turned into student flats. There had still been a light on. Her flatmate must have waited up for her, Mary had said, and John was glad.

Mary Morstan _was_ a peculiar person, he thought. Agreeing on a story about why they had been at Sholto’s villa had been her idea; and he had had no compunctions about repeating their cover to the pimply officer at the Yard. He was unlikely to _ever_ feel bad about disrespectful behaviour towards the police again.

So, yes. He was going to.

But Mary beat him to it (like she was going to continue doing). Early in the afternoon someone rang at the door. John threw a suspicious glance out of the window – and felt his stomach tighten at the sight of Mary Morstan on the steps.

This time, he was making a choice. It had been a matter of chance the first time he opened the door for a... to hell with it, _client_. Doing the same thing now suddenly felt like a turning point. Which was ridiculous, John told himself sternly. Ella and her fucked up analyses could go and rot in hell.

Mrs Hudson led their visitor up the stairs, and John was glad to hear her chattering in her usual manner. The hours after he had explained the situation to her were among the most uncomfortable ones John could remember. He knew it was the only thing he could do once he had hinted at the reasons for Sherlock’s death. But the good old lady had been, and still was, deeply shocked, as John knew she would be. As he knew from his own experience. Why on earth hadn’t he spared her this?

“John, Miss Morstan for you.”

She stood in his door, pale and tense. Unsure of her welcome, very obviously.

“Th-thank you, Mrs Hudson.” John limped a few steps into the room. “Come in, please.”

Mrs Hudson gave him a nod and mouthed a clearly visible “Lovely” behind Mary’s back before she retreated, closing the door.

John fought the urge to roll his eyes.

“I’m sorry to get you involved again. But I need your help.” With that she opened her palm, offering it up to John in an odd gesture, he thought. That was when he noticed the little item sitting there.

* * *

 

* * *

“Er...”

Mary Morstan might have been hoping for a more enlightened comment on the... thing on her palm, but she did not look like she really expected anything else. She lifted her hand a bit more, until it was level with John’s eyes, and he squinted hard.

What had, on first sight, more than a fleeting similarity to an elongated, coated liquorice drop, he saw now, was drilled through its length and carried odd markings on its surface. It seemed to be cut from some kind of stone, too.

“What is that?”

Mary’s fingers closed around the item, and she ran the fingers of her empty hand through her hair nervously. “It’s something that doesn’t make any sense! Or maybe it does... But whatever is going on, _I_ don’t think Tad Sholto killed his brother, do you?” she demanded, upset.

“What?”

“Haven’t you read the papers?” she asked, very much surprised. “They arrested him the morning right after we...”

“Why would _he_ kill his brother? And how could he-?”

“Exactly.”

John watched her trying to calm herself. She was still pale, but the agitation had painted some colour onto her cheeks. It did not make her look any healthier. She had not slept much either, he deduced. He still had no clue what had put her into this state, though. When she had come here three days ago to ask for his help, she had been very collected, and even at the crime scene she had -

“Mary.” She made eye contact immediately, and from _something_ there he was sure he was right. “You took that ... item from the crime scene, didn’t you?”

Her gaze skipped for a fraction. Then it was back and she gave a tiny nod.

“ _What_ the fuck _is_ it?”

She drew a deep breath and opened her hand again. “It’s a royal seal, Neo-Assyrian, inscribed in cuneiforms, still using an Akkadian dialect though, so _early_ new empire,” she rattled off.

They both looked at the small little artefact.

“You’re not a _doctor_ doctor,” was, incongruously, the first thing that got into John’s head and came out of his mouth. And even he could hear it sounded strangely accusing.

“But you are. An army doctor, Molly said... Obviously one who’s no good at seeing blood,” she quipped. “That must be very inconvenient.”

The word _blood_ – together with memories, some recent, some old, flashing in his mind - did something odd to his circulation.

“All right, I’m sorry. Really. John?” Mary looked flustered, and he wondered what he must be looking like to fell her in mid-stride like that. “So, now you know one of my major flaws. I’m too damn curious, and I tend to speak before I think.”

John couldn’t suppress a snort at that. “No, it’s all right. And I _can_ stomach... blood. It’s just – well.” Not on a floor? Not when it’s running from someone’s bashed-in head? He quickly took the two remaining steps to his chair and tried to make letting himself fall into it look nonchalant.

“No, it’s none of my business. I am sorry. I’m just jittery,” (yes, John could see that), “because I’ve been doing too much thinking.” Mary looked uncertainly at him.

“Okay. Again, then. You are not a doctor.”

“Archaeologist.”

That was when John’s gaze wandered up Mary’s wrist and fell onto her watch. “Oh. Fuck. They’ll chuck me out before I even start.”

 

Just what he needed. A diversion. Like it wasn’t going to be difficult enough with him not having worked at all for about eighteen months, dreading – yes, thank you so much for reminding me, Mary Morstan – his reaction to seeing any quantity of blood, fearing messing up because of the tremor in his hand that he had _obviously_ kept secret, and being among so _many_  people the whole fucking day!

He made it through the shift. And another. He marvelled that they were apparently going to let him continue what was his trial period. Must be a testimony to just _how_ badly they needed someone willing to work the mad hours they had assigned for him to be on call.

His thoughts were continually going back to the surreal scene with Mary Morstan. What the hell was wrong with that woman? He should have stayed and listened to what she had come to tell him but…

_How could he have time management problems the first bloody day he made good on his promise to Mrs Hudson?_

Stepping outside, John stared longingly at the taxis waiting in front of the hospital’s entrance, and took the tube home. It was very late after the double-shift they’d loaded him with, rather cool now, and he knew he was limping even worse than usually.

 

To his utter astonishment, the flat was not empty. Mrs Hudson had gone to bed at 10 PM, John knew. She always kept her hours. But when he had hauled himself up the stairs, and shoved the door to the living room open, he found Mary lying on her side, on Sherlock’s sofa (where John now usually spent his nights). She was not sleeping but very tired, obviously, staring mesmerised at the artefact she held before her eyes. For a moment, in the sideways light, John saw the track marks of tears that had already dried.

“I think I know what all this might be about,” she said, not looking at him this time. Her voice was small when she went on, “Sholto did something _awful_ , and my father might indeed have something to do with it.”

“What- How?”

“I don’t know. _I just don’t know!_ ” Mary’s frustration was apparent, as she sat up quickly.

“All right. Explain it to me. What do you know about that thing you showed me? And where does your father come into this?”

“My father was one of the archaeologists that the Cultural Property Advisory Committee consulted with before and during the invasion in Iraq. And since he has spent years in the region, speaks different Arabic dialects, and feels pretty much at home in the Near East, he was one of the few American civilians to be there when Baghdad fell.” Mary’s line of thoughts stuck on something, and it took her a few moments to go on.

“He’s a specialist for the early Mesopotamian cultures. Ur, Akkad, the Assyrians, Babylonians... He’s worked at universities all over the world, in Berlin for the last few years, where they have some damned fine... anyway”, she stopped herself from a reminiscence that was very obviously meaningful only to her, here.

“When things started to calm down, my father became something of a coordinator between the international and Iraqi antiquities boards, running a lot of different projects to ascertain the damage to the known sites. You might have heard something about the looting during the war. It was everywhere in the papers for some time,” she said scornfully. “The Muslim barbarians tearing apart their country’s greatest treasures, destroying or selling their cultural heritage, and no one seemed to care enough to stop them, the allies standing by and watching them take away some the oldest remains of human civilisation.”

Interesting as all this was, John felt – and wasn’t that _familiar_ – like he had missed whatever linked Mary’s lecture to her words before. “Wait a moment. _What_ has all this to do with Sholto and that… seal-thing?”

“It’s- It’s,” Mary shot him an incredulous look. “It’s _Assyrian_ , John. This artefact cannot have come from anywhere but Iraq.”

Mary looked deeply upset, and John was so tired, and maybe too unused to actual human interaction, that it took him ridiculously long to figure out why.

“And now you fear that your father... you are afraid that he is, or was, involved in something, because of what Tad said?”

“John. Don’t you get it? There’s no way that this is the _only_ item that got into Sholto’s possession. Getting his hands on _this_ ,” she rolled the seal over in her palm, “would be like a wet dream for people of that kind. If he had _this_ , he was big business,” she declared. “I would bet my career that Sholto smuggled, and on a large scale. Either for wealthy bidders, or maybe he’s a collector himself. I think he might have been, with an ostentatious villa like that...”

“Mary,” John put in with as much force as he could - cross-eyed with fatigue, and so cold inside for reasons he _could_ not think through now, “all this is pure conjecture.”

“No, it’s not. I looked him up on the Internet, and Sholto _was_ in Iraq, for years! At the same time that my father was.”

“That’s not saying that Sholto and your father knew each other!“

Mary shook her head. “But they must have! We _have_ proof that there’s a connection, John. Me. The money.”

He could not argue with that. “But we know nothing of the nature of that connection.” _Things could be very different from what they appear._

Mary nodded almost angrily, then gave him a small smile. “No conclusions without evidence, right?”

“Right. We have to gather information first, all right?”

“We? So you _are_ still going to help me?”

John felt this stomach clench. But he could not _not_ do it, just because it was Ella who had pointed it out to him. He _had_ promised to help Mary, he could not stop doing this just because the hurt was eating at his insides.

“Yes, I will.” John continued speaking against the deep disappointment, verging on desperation, in Mary’s eyes. “There could be something very different to the whole thing than we know.”

Mary grimaced. “Yes, okay.” She didn’t sound it.

“Just because Sholto brought this one little item back...” He was not sure where that sentence was meant to be going.

“...and my father took money from him, it doesn’t have to mean anything?” Mary added, with quiet venom. “But it’s more likely that it does, because, you see, this is not just some piece Sholto picked up, incidentally, on some Iraqi tell. I know _exactly_ where this was found once. And I know where Sholto got it, too.”

“So? Where _did_ it come from?” he offered the prompt, reflexively.

“Ever heard of the _Treasure of Nimrud_?

 

They didn’t get much further that night. It was all too much for John to take in. He was vaguely aware of falling asleep while Mary was still talking to him, listing the incredibly valuable collection of over six hundred bracelets, necklaces and royal tiaras and other artefacts made of gold and semi-precious stones that made up the so-called _Treasure of Nimrud_ , once the pride of the Baghdad National Museum. Her voice carried him over the usually elusive threshold to sleep.

* * *

Sunlight hit his eyes, when he changed into that strange realm between sleep and proper wakefulness. He smelt tea, and the splashing sound of water hitting the shower made it clear that Sherlock had got up before him. Or hadn’t been to bed at all. John drowsily thought he didn’t care this time. After all, his flatmate _had_ obviously bothered to make some tea, for once. And he thought he’d forgive him for just about everything at the moment because -

John’s thoughts returned to reality the second the water in the bathroom was turned off. He felt sick.

Before his heart had stopped racing, or his stomach calmed down, someone knocked at the door. _God, what now?_

The answer presented itself in the unexpected figure of Lestrade standing in the doorway.

“Hello, John. I know it’s early, but I was on my way to –“ The DI didn’t even stutter; it was like the words simply fell out of his mind the instance Mary Morstan stepped out of the bathroom. Thankfully dressed, but with her hair hanging wet around her shoulders and her feet bare.

“Good morning, Inspector,” she said in passing, circling around him in the hallway and entering the kitchen through the hallway door. Once out of Lestrade’s sight, she shot John a round-eyed, questioning stare. _What is the DI doing here? Does he suspect why we were at the Sholto villa? Are we in trouble?_

John didn’t have an answer to any of that, but a suspicion that the Inspector is not here on official business. Not quite. So he’s unlikely to say anything with a stranger present. And why _is_ she still here, anyway?

“Come in, Lestrade. Tea?”

 

It was obvious that Lestrade was immediately having a discourse with himself as to whether or not coming here had been a good idea after all. The folder marked ‘Pondicherry’ lay on the coffee table, tantalising, staring at John with its punched-through holes for the string holding the thing together.

“Do you mind?” Lestrade asked suddenly, pulling a cigarette packet from his jacket.

What happened to the nicotine patches? John wondered, but nodded his okay, even as he fought down the memory of the last time anyone had smoked in these rooms.

Mary brought their cups of tea and set them down next to the folder. As she walked behind his armchair, she put her hand in an entirely inappropriate, decidedly intimate gesture against John’s neck. He found himself acutely aware that no one had touched him – apart from Mrs Hudson’s motherly embrace – since Ella’s creeping fingers on his face, that day in the cemetery.

“Would you like one, too?” Lestrade offered hopefully, as Mary settled down beside him on the sofa. John would never understand the attraction of drawing others into one’s vices. A sentiment Ella would have had a good laugh at, he assumed. He was less than pleased when Mary accepted the fag, smiling.

“Well, John. I wanted to ask you...” With an effort, he forced himself to listen to what Lestrade was saying.

“Sorry?”

“All right, let me fill you in first.” Lestrade’s fingers hesitated one last time over the folder. Then, he made up his mind and took out a photo, putting it on the table. “We found this small, bare foot print, in blood. It was not immediately helpful. But at least it was proof that Sholto can’t have been alone that night.”

Mary, peered at the picture for a moment, unsurprised. She had noticed the print herself, as John knew from their short talk in the taxi. “From the size this must be from a woman’s, or even a child’s, foot,” she remarked.

“You’re right. It’s only nineteen centimetres long, so most likely not a man’s. Well, once Lawrence had got into the villa’s security, we expected to know more about Sholto’s companion. Unfortunately, the surveillance had been deactivated around the time that Bartholomew Sholto returned that night. Mrs Ikram, the housekeeper, confirmed that the younger Sholto used to do this, on occasion.”

“What k-kind of oc...casion?” John asked.

“Well. A young man with a lot of money like that… He seems to have had a number of fast-changing girlfriends, if you can even call them that, over the past few months.”

“Since his father’s death, you mean.”

“Actually, this seems to be something that started _before_ his father fell sick. So he got into the habit of deactivating some of the cameras, when he wished for more privacy than his father usually granted him.”

“Lovely f-family.” And so much for the oh-so-close relationship between Bart and old Sholto, John thought.

Lestrade gave a crooked smile, drawing again on his cigarette which had gathered almost an inch of ash at its tip. “Sorry, where should I-“

Before John could so much as twitch, Mary had jumped from her place on the sofa and was halfway to the kitchen.

“Do you have an ashtray, John?” He could already hear her rummaging in the cupboards. “Or should I- Ah, never mind, I’ve found it.”

Lestrade smiled his thanks at the lively woman, who solicitously placed a large crystal ashtray on the coffee table.

The glinting surfaces caught and fractured the bright high summer light, drawing colours from the brilliant white. The kaleidoscope painted images from a different time in John’s mind with much surer strokes than the current reality did. That day. How _right_ Ella was. He was cheating fate. The idea that... It _was_ incomprehensible that Sherlock would die, while he, John Watson, mediocre, normal, unimportant, dispensable Watson lived. A cosmic joke.  It must be the most senseless thing he had ever known.

_And you invaded Afghanistan._ John screwed his eyes shut.

“John?”

Ella must have been right about him liking her. How else could it be explained that he was not yelling at her intrusion, her presence, the way she...

“John, are you-?” Lestrade began.

“ _Yes, I’m fine._ ” The three seconds of intense staring between John and the DI after this ridiculous statement surely didn’t go unnoticed, but thankfully uncommented, by Mary. It was like standing on a land mine, expecting Lestrade to say the wrong thing. Then John gratefully remembered that Lestrade couldn’t _know_ – though probably guess - what was the matter, for once.

“Okay.” Lestrade nodded and got back to business (like a man very inured to much stranger company than John would ever be). “We got lucky with the cameras in the neighbourhood. Sholto’s red Porsche 911 is not really inconspicuous. And now, my sniffer dog Toby has found –“

“I thought Anderson –“ _was your sniffer dog_. The words echoed through both their minds until Lestrade caught himself.

“Anderson’s been transferred.” _After what happened._ Gods, the day seemed to consist of nothing but subtext by now, and John knew he couldn’t handle his own mind well enough to stand much more of that.

“Well, then.”

“Toby thinks he knows where Sholto spent the evening. And I thought maybe, if you can spare the time, you’d like to have a look with me. But if you are otherwise –“ The Detective Inspector made a vague gesture towards Mary and John.

“Oh, I need to get to work, anyway,” Mary smiled, doing her hair up swiftly and pinning it in place with a pencil lying on the table. John was certain she was happy to get away, too...

“John?” Lestrade checked.

“I need to be back for my afternoon shift.” Some part of his addled brain provided a replay of Ella’s sneer at his inability to just say _yes_ or _no_.

“No problem. I’ll be waiting downstairs, then.” Lestrade beat a slightly smirking retreat (and why exactly was John angry about that now?), after he had shaken Mary’s hand.

“Well, that was unexpected,” Mary said, as soon as the DI had left, eyeing John curiously.

John could not think of a single thing to say. This was becoming a regular occurrence, it seemed. Mary stood in front of him, pulling her socks on and still expecting a reaction that was not forthcoming.

“Well, time to go collect information, then.”

John watched her step into her sneakers and walk out of the flat.

“See you later,” she called, before the door shut behind her downstairs.

* * *

“Do you mind?”

“No.” It hardly made a difference, the car smelled like an ashtray already. “No nicotine patches anymore?”

Lestrade swallowed. Twice, before he stated, flatly. “Andrea has left me.” _For good. And I don’t particularly want her back, but it’s still fucking awful._ A different kind of subtext, on the surface much... simpler then before. “She took the children with her, of course.”

Simpler, but hardly any more comforting. Not like himself anymore. True. He should have known, hell, _cared_ before...

They drove on in silence for a while.

“You know, this Pondicherry case, it’s like the classic perfect murder,” Lestrade remarked, when they got nearer their destination. “A door locked from inside, no key _anywhere_ , and no way that a murderer could have fled the scene.” _Right down your street_ , Mrs Hudson commented in his head. “We actually looked into the possibility that this might have been a particularly bizarre accident. Or even a... suicide. By now, I would vastly prefer it if it was.”

“Hm.”

“But forensics found proof that he was injected with a strange mix of chemicals before he took the fall down from that gallery.”

“Ah.”

“And he was killed mere minutes before the police arrived... not much time for some kind of complicated vanishing act.”

All John could suddenly feel was tired. “I didn’t notice then, but it’s true. The body’s temperature was almost lifelike still. He must have died while Tad Sholto was with Mary... and me. So, why is he still in custody?”

“He _is_ the only person with even a possible motive.”

“And has he got tiny feet? I didn’t notice.”

Lestrade snorted, clearly unhappy. “I’m not saying he laid hands on his brother personally. But someone with a key must at least be involved, and you know how it is, sometimes. We haven’t got anyone else to suspect.”

John turned his face towards the window. There was a plethora of things he might have said about the police not caring about the lives they fucked up by unfounded arrests and accusations with no basis at all. As it was, he kept the bitterness to himself and tried to ignore the returning sick feeling in his stomach.

“ _He_ would already have solved it, wouldn’t he,” mumbled Lestrade.

Quiet spread like a gelatinous thing in the car.

 

Lestrade heaved an audible sigh of relief when they arrived at Imperial Wharf Pier. John, who was not particularly fond of any vehicle moving across water, scanned the row of moorings and the two piers reaching out into the river like greedy arms.

They found the _Aurora_ , a quite large and relatively new party boat,with no difficulty, and Lestrade was expected by the owner himself. The interview went smoothly, Mr Smith confirming that, yes, Bartholomew Sholto was a regular visitor, particularly over the last few months. He was generous with the staff, and the ladies, which made more than up for what he lacked in looks and actual social nicety. Mr Smith resolutely denied knowledge of anything that went on with said _ladies_ off-board his ship. But it was not uncommon, from what he had incidentally observed, for Sholto to offer them a ride home. To his or theirs, how would he know?

All in all, Smith turned out to be quite the keen observer. He gave Lestrade a surprisingly clear description of what he called “Sholto’s type” (petit, dark, rather pale; according to Smith this equalled the textbook version of the French type), and he was quite certain that there had been someone with him last Saturday night. He had no recollection of that particular lady, but declared himself happy enough to help the police and not make a fuss when Lestrade’s men returned that evening to interview the rest of his staff.

“All I can say is, that she must have been new. Not someone I knew, or I _would_ remember. I never forget a face, you know.”

With that they left the _Aurora_ , and John was trailing behind Lestrade over the broad gangway, when, from the corner of his eye, he saw someone moving about on one of the boats a few moorings away, and... for a fraction of a second, there was _something_ about the lanky, dark-clad man now staring out over the river that made his heart stumble a painful few beats. John had never had a hallucination before (and no, hearing the Voice was not the same thing, not in his book). And he was _not_ going to start now.

 

Angry with himself from that heart-wrenching, stupid second of non-recognition, about that man with the indecency to resemble his best friend - who was fucking _dead_ \- John got only more upset when his hour long phone calls to people he had no wish to talk to at all, but who were the only ones he knew had served in Iraq, didn’t yield _any_ thing of worth. At work, he found he was also angry with the chief nurse who was taking bets how long he’d be staying on, already.

In short, he was angry. At _everything_ that was wrong.

Like coming home to their flat and, again, finding Mary already – or considering the hour of night, _still_ \- there, sitting at the corner of the coffee table she had cleared for her notes, eager to share her finds.

But his resentment faded, when that night, and all the nights that followed, he was too tired to think about _anything_ anymore... Which felt incredibly good for a change. The acceptance these thoughts surely carried stirred something deep down, uncomfortably, and so he focused on the task before him.

“You glowered, you know,” Mary complained to him in the break they took from comparing their notes, some time between 3 and 4 AM..

“What?”

“Haven’t felt watched with this much indignation since my dad caught me smoking when I was seventeen.”

John merely shrugged. “It doesn’t really suit you.”

“See, that’s why I don’t smoke.”

“What?”

“The life of a soldier must be more different from that of an archaeologist’s than I assumed. Never smoked out of sympathy? Or for bonding reasons?”

“You were ... manipulating Lestrade.”

“Gosh, don’t make it sound like I made an attempt on the Crown Jewels, will you?”

“Ah. That was also why you...” John made a vague gesture towards his neck.

“Oh.” Mary’s cheeks gained a little colour. “I’m sorry if I... The DI seemed very intent on telling you about the case, but he appeared bothered by my presence, so I felt I had to do something to ease his mind about it. And the best way to do that is act like you belong exactly where you are.”

“It’s all right,” he offered, probably rather unconvincingly.

“I don’t think it is.” Mary’s contrition reminded him of her words the day before. She had warned him that she was prone to put her foot in it. And proved the accuracy of that right away now, asking: “Who was she?”

“Who was who?”

“Whoever that ashtray belonged to. And the rest of these things you can’t clear away, and you don’t like being touched.”

Whatever it was that his brain automatically supplied as an answer, it never made it past John’s windpipe.

* * *

 

* * *

Two weeks later. The most tightly packed, sleep-depriving, case-like weeks John had seen in fourteen months. Fourteen days since he’d last seen (and during which  he’d only sporadically heard from) Lestrade, who was now pacing furiously in front of John, chain-smoking again.

“I don’t fucking believe this”, the DI was saying, once more. “Another body! A dead girl! What is going on here? Or more to the point, what the hell are you up to, John?”

John deemed it wiser not to try speaking up again.

“It was _no_ coincidence you were here when Bartholomew Sholto was found dead, was it! You have been working on _something_ behind my back all this time. And I was fucking stupid enough to take you along to the interview with Smith! Because I hoped - Forget it.”

John had never seen Lestrade as livid as this – or heard him talk so obscenely - and it felt strangely relieving that for once someone was not treating him... carefully.

“Look, can we talk-”

“No.”

Donovan appeared in the door. “Sir, the crime scene team is here. And the guys from uni will be here within the next half-hour. Should I have someone drive Dr Watson and Miss Morstan home?”

Lestrade looked at his sergeant for a moment, then squinted at John. “No. Not this time. We’ll take them in for interrogation.”

Strangely, Donovan did not look as thrilled at the prospect as John would have expected. She wisely made sure not to touch him when she led him to one of the police cars lining up on the semi-circular driveway in front of the villa’s main entrance.

“Get in, John. Take them to headquarters. The DI is going to interrogate them once we’ve finished here,” she ordered John, and informed the officer behind the wheel.

John fell into the seat, too tired to speak, even with his partner in crime, who was already stowed there. The car pulled away, navigating ambulance, coroner, and the crime scene van before reaching the gate and speeding up.

“And to think that I feared life in England would bore me to death,” he heard Mary mumble to herself.

 

“And now, I want you to tell me. You tell me the whole story, and you’d better make sure I believe you, or there’s every chance you’ll be charged for obstructing justice, and possibly as accessory to murder.” Lestrade’s gaze veered towards Mary when he said that last part.

Donovan took out a picture of a woman that, John couldn’t help thinking, looked perfectly like Smith’s French type (Little wonder, because this _was_ the woman the owner of the _Aurora_ had seen with Sholto the night of his death.). The only thing marring her beauty was the fact that she was dead. And although he and Mary had been faster than the police, they had still been too late, too damned slow to figure it out before this young woman died. And it had not been a pretty death, dehydration...

“Let’s start with something simple: Who is she?” Donovan turned the picture towards Mary and John, sitting on the opposite side of the grey table in the interrogation room. John was no longer astonished that Moriarty had not been impressed very much. He had seen more intimidating surroundings than this even before he ever went to the army, and as a consulting criminal, Moriarty must have sniggered at the harmlessness of the Yard’s attempts.

“We do not know.” Mary’s voice was even, and utterly serious.

“You broke into Sholto’s villa and found her body, but you claim you do not know who she was?”

John scanned the sergeant’s face, maybe looking for _some_ sign of remorse about what she had said last time. There was none.

“We did not break in,” John corrected.

“Right.” Donovan nodded. “And how often did you not break in?”

“Only tonight, and Tad Sholto _allowed_ us to go there,” he answered coolly. He was not going to be playing into her hands again.

“Who is himself under suspicion of involvement with his brother’s death, and was no resident of said villa in the last five years.”

“So, you talked to Tad Sholto?” Lestrade put in.

“Well, no. We contacted him through his lawyer, once you released him on bail.” Tad Sholto was at the centre of a veritable media circus at the moment; one that Mary and he had no intention of getting caught in.

“But he sent you a key for the villa, asking you to check on it for him?” Donovan’s voice oozed sarcasm.

“Of course not,” John stalled.

“Of course _not_ ,” Mary echoed him immediately. “Access to the premises is granted upon entering an eight digit combination of numbers and symbols. Only inside the villa are conventional keys still used. And the door to Bart Sholto’s flat was still open, for obvious reasons. Do keep up, Sergeant... Donovan.”

John felt a slow smile creep up from somewhere, just as Lestrade commented, “God. You’re just as bad as them.”

The DI’s face went from normal to white to red. Donovan watched her superior with pursed lips for a moment, and stepped in again:

“Well, Miss Morstan, I suggest that _you_ keep up then, as well. Because from where I stand it’s beginning to look a _lot_ like you are connected to Sholto’s illegal antiquities business. And that, even as a suspicion, will not reflect well upon your professional career, I’m sure. We checked you. And we checked your account, and guess what we found there?”

“Donovan,” John aimed for his reasonable voice, not sure how successful he was. “It’s _not_ the way you think.”

“Oh, shut up, John. I _really_ don’t want to think about whether or not you know what Dr. Morstan’s after. I _am_ aware that she might have used you here; you’re an expertly uncritical assistant, after all.”

“Donovan.” Lestrade warned.

“All right, let’s stick to the facts: You entered a house you had no reason to be in – or the housekeeper would not have made that impressively hysterical call to us - where, by chance, you found a dead woman, _and_ one of the largest collections of illegally obtained antiques in this country. Our experts haven’t finished their report yet, but they’ve told us that some of the artefacts in that secret showroom will cause a sensation when their discovery is made public. They also said that the most valuable pieces are all from the Near East, for which, coincidentally, you are an expert.” When Mary did not bother to deny any of this, the sergeant went on: “So tell me, Dr. Morstan, how did this scheme with the late Major Sholto work? And what went wrong when he died? Got into debates with his heirs about the best way to continue business, or did Bartholomew Sholto want to stop the illegal practices of his father’s? Was that what you were going to _convince_ him of that night, together with Thaddeus Sholto? You see, we’ve done our homework, as well, Dr. Morstan.”

“If you had, you would know that Mary was _not_ involved in Sholto’s smuggling scheme!” John snapped.

“Is that so?” Donovan asked icily. “Convince me.”

As Mary started talking about the mail he had received from Tad Sholto, and recounted the events that had led up to their appearance on the crime scene of Bart Sholto’s death, John felt his thoughts wander. He stared at the sergeant for a moment, who had provoked him so thoroughly the last time they met. With a suppressed snort he remembered a short exchange with Mary the night after his visit to the marina.

_“I feel like I’m spilling my life’s story, and I know nothing at all about you...” Mary had remarked. “How come that DI – Lestrade? – even took you along today?”_

_“I’ve had... dealings with the police before.”_

_“And here was I thinking he’d rung some door bell at random.”_

_“Ha-ha.”_

_“Besides that much was more than obvious from that... should I say encounter, or shouting match, you had with your ex at the villa.”_

Too curious and speaking before thinking, definitely. John half-listened to Mary now confessing to the sergeant and Lestrade how she had found the little seal a few feet away from the body, not really aware of what she was doing as she picked it up instinctively. She went on talking about her investigations of the inscription on that seal, and her visit to John after that; how he had cautioned her into doing research before drawing too-quick conclusions. And then the next day when the Detective Inspector had turned up on their doorstep.

“John?” Lestrade checked, probably sensing him drift. “What had you found out, then, Miss Morstan?”

“I had written down a list and made enquiries about the different towns and sites where my father had been living and working. And it turned out that he and Sholto were both in Baghdad at the same time, but only for about two weeks. My father left the capital almost right away to advise on the securing of the more remote sites.”

Lestrade gestured her to go on.

“Well, we figured that’s not much time to form a connection.”

“No, it wouldn’t seem so.” Lestrade agreed.

John had said pretty much the same thing. ‘ _What two weeks were that?’_ he had wanted to know.

_‘During and right after the occupation of the city.’_

_‘Chaotic, no routine, little time to get into such complicated business.’_ And yet, it must have started then.

“John found out that Sholto left Iraq, and the Army, in 2006; but maybe they stayed in touch nonetheless.”

Yes, _maybe_. This maybe had turned out to be their biggest problem...

“And did they?” Lestrade asked.

“Well, we have no _real_ evidence but-,” Mary conceded, looking like she was waiting for a blow from Donovan.

“So you’re saying that not you, but your _father_ and Sholto were behind that prospering smuggling business?”

“We are not _saying_ that; it’s only a hypothesis!” John contradicted. “ _One_ possible explanation.”

Donovan snorted. “But one that fits all the facts?” John fixed his eyes on Mary, breathing slowly and denying himself any verbal reaction to the blatant bait. Besides, she was right, of course. It was all so perfectly obvious. Constructing a _possible_ explanation, a perfectly logical one. Because who better than an archaeologist to smuggle? Since the Blind Banker case, John had a rough picture about the workings of the smuggling business, and so he had paid a visit to the National Antiquities Museum to ask a few questions there. Morstan had been travelling the country, and for the ever-growing number of site securing projects he was administrating, he had made liberal use of the military’s logistics. But that alone was still no proof!

Distinguishing cause from effect was what made deductions so difficult. John had never really appreciated _how_ brilliant you had to be to tell those apart, and while Sherlock... John’s thoughts skittered away over the frosty ground in his head.

“Well, that’s certainly a clever scheme, considering your father’s status,” Donovan continued. “Leaving aside John’s romantic delusions for a moment, I wonder what reason _you_ could possibly have had to contact Sholto’s heirs then, though. Were you acting in your father’s name?”

“I did not contact them at all.”

“Well, so your father’s... business partners wanted to meet with you...” John didn’t like the edge to Donovan’s voice. It sounded like the single-minded streak she had exhibited before. Lestrade must be hearing it, too.

“You know, there’s only one way to clear this up, I think,” the DI said, and John knew what was going to come now, “we’ll have to interview your father. Where can we contact him?”

Mary just shook her head.

‘ _You know, I don’t understand_ ,’ _John had said more gently._ _‘Why don’t you just ask your father about it? He might be able to clear all this up, after all.’_

“That’s not possible.” Mary hesitated. “He... disappeared last year, on some routine inspection tour round Diwaniyah.“

“He’s-?“

“No. I do not know. Nobody does. Or so the Army says.” _‘And now that they’re finally gone I don’t think that a missing archaeologist ranks particularly high on their list of things to get into a fight about with the Iraqi government,’ she had added to John._

John could read the same thought in Lestrade’s face now, that must have been on his own, when Mary had given this explanation to him. He had been such an idiot. He should have asked that question much earlier. Mary was so determined, so stubbornly staying involved, because she was desperately hoping for this to turn into breadcrumbs that led to her father. After a year of nothing, _anything_ was better than-

“How convenient,” Donovan remarked in a tone that set John’s teeth on edge, even though he knew she _was_ only doing her job.

“You know, Donovan, even assuming that the theory about Sholto smuggling _is_ correct. It’s still possible that Mary’s father found out about it and-”

“John.” Mary said, looking down. The _Shut up_ was implicit.

“And how do you explain the money, then? Oh. You think he got wind of what was going on and _blackmailed_ Sholto?” Lestrade asked, looking intrigued.

“Well, either way, my father obviously played a role in this; and it surely doesn’t look like he tried to stop Sholto’s criminal activities,” Mary replied in the same toneless voice John had heard when they had first realised this.

“You must have been very angry when you found out that your father did not stick to the code of honour,” Donovan remarked. “Was that your reason to hate Bartholomew Sholto, then? Was he about to expose what your father did?”

“You are seriously beginning to remind me of my grandfather’s terrier, Sergeant Donovan.”

 

After this ill-advised comment, they let them stew in their cells for a few hours. Probably Lestrade and Donovan - and the rest of the _new_ team - were trying to deal with all the additional information the body, the antiquities, and their statements had provided so far.

John did not mind very much. Escaping a room with Mary, whom he liked but didn’t really understand, and Donovan, whom he understood but couldn’t stand, was definitely an improvement.

 

Lestrade was alone when the jailer eventually brought him back to the interrogation room. Or rather, he was without Donovan. Mary was already seated at the table, looking more relaxed now.

“So far your story checks out, and I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt,” Lestrade was saying. How surprising... Sod _his_ romantic delusions, John thought, when Mary took another cigarette with a grateful smile. If only Lestrade knew...

“That smuggling angle will certainly lead to new suspects besides Tad Sholto,” Lestrade was saying. ”My team’s on it.”

“An angle you would not even know about without us,” John pointed out, limping into the room.

“An angle, John, we could have known about _two weeks earlier_ , if you hadn’t withheld evidence and information,” Lestrade snapped. “Sit down. Has it ever crossed your mind to talk to me before going off and finding another body?”

“It has. But, firstly, we did not expect the murderer to be in the safe room still, and with regard to Mary’s father, I am sure you see why we wanted to be reasonably sure what to tell before involving you.”

“No, I don’t, actually. I would have-”

Lestrade fell silent, as Donovan entered the room, a kind of sneer on her face when she took in their little circle. John wondered what exactly had happened between them after... after Sherlock. That she was still here, and Anderson had gone.

He had a sudden suspicion as to why Lestrade had left the majority of the interrogation to his sergeant. Maybe it was the price to be paid for Lestrade being allowed to work on a case that involved him, at all.

“So, can we continue?” Donovan pulled out a tablet computer to look at something on the screen. “Let’s talk about that ominous _treasure_ that you claim Tad Sholto told you about... Our experts have finished their preliminary inventory, and they are adamant that while there are numerous, interesting pieces from Iraq among the collection, only a small number _might_ possibly be connected to that one.” She showed five or six full screen pictures of little statuettes and some pieces of jewellery to Mary, as she spoke.

“Well, I could have told you the same if you had bothered to ask.” Mary was doing a fair job of staring the sergeant down. “I am also sure that your experts have informed you in no uncertain terms that the _Treasure of Nimrud_ can’t be involved here anyway, since it has, allegedly, been ‘rescued’ two years back. Am I right?”

“ _Always_ , Miss Morstan. According to the experts, it seems that the whereabouts of all the treasure are well-known by now.”

“Seems. Yes, that’s a good choice of words. You see, the problem is knowing what was part of the treasure in the first place. The items that are called _Treasure of Nimrud_ were not locked up in a cosy little treasure chest... It’s the name given to a hoard of artefacts found in 1988, in several subterranean building structures, that turned out to be the richest burials that had been found in Mesopotamia in more than fifty years, and no less spectacular as Carter’s discoveries in the Valley of the Kings in 1920. It was a sensation! The official number of items is usually given as 613, but _we_ surely don’t know all the records, or what happened on the site once the Gulf War started.”

“You mean _more_ things might have been excavated, that are not known even to the professional public?”

“Well. Unfortunately, politics and archaeology clash more often than they get on, or even collaborate harmoniously. During the Gulf War and because of the subsequent instability, there was very little research that we know of. And it’s not like there were all that many professional archaeologists left, what with all those that died in the war, or chose exile... In 2000, Saddam eventually allowed international teams of archaeologists to do some research again, but circumstances were, to put it mildly, intolerable. We had to wear body armour, and always needed an armed escort...”

John frowned at Mary’s casual admission that she had actually been there. She had not mentioned it before.

“Anyway. There was not much further work carried out at Nimrud, and I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what happened shortly after that, which put excavations on halt _again_. The Treasure had not been publicly seen since 1990, when it was allegedly transferred to safe storage.” Mary gave a light snort. “National Geographic made such a big deal of that discovery, in 2003, in the bank vault! But two years ago now, two earrings turned up in the US at an auction, that could not but be part of the Nimrud treasure! Those should not have been there either, but obviously there _has_ been some disruption to those allegedly untouched boxes in the vault – or, as I believe now, some part of the treasure never was brought there for safekeeping.”

“You aren’t swamping us with archaeological mumbo-jumbo to cover up a rather sensation-seeking lie now, are you, _Doctor_ Morstan?”

For the first time, Mary looked seriously angry. “If this is over your head, sergeant, I’ll gladly draw you a flow chart.”

Lestrade cut off whatever Donavan was about to answer. “I’m sorry, but I don’t see why it’s so important whether it’s _this_ treasure, or other valuable, stolen antiquities.”

“Well, the smugglers might think differently,” Mary remarked.

“And _you_ might, as well,” Donovan shot back.

“Maybe we could leave archaeological speculation aside for now? I am sure that the workings of the smuggling scheme as such will be more relevant to our murder investigation than wondering about legendary treasure.”

“We have _got_ our murderer, Sir.” Donovan said, then bit her lip, probably remembering that this was through no feat of theirs.

“Whose identity we _still_ don’t know, sergeant. I take it that we all agree that the dead woman’s identity may take us closer to the solution to this matter. _If_ she is connected to the smuggling scheme in some way.”

“She must be,” John said, fed up with what felt too much like a cat fight by now. “She knew about the secret room, and unless Sholto was involved in more organised crime, it surely does offer motives for killing the man, even if we do not know precisely what they were yet.”

“I agree. But there _have_ to be more people involved than this young woman who might or might not be responsible for Bartholomew Sholto’s death. The question is, who is pulling the strings here.” Lestrade ran his hands through his hair. “So, what about the results of your... _investigations_ : Did you find anything a bit more... viable than the synchronicity of their stay in Baghdad alone, that connects Sholto and your father, Miss Morstan?”

“Well, possibly,” Mary said.

It had taken the two of them the better part of two night shifts of going through their collection of data to finally hit upon the odd little thing that John couldn’t help but feel certain Sherlock would have seen within minutes.

“He was in London,” John stated. “A few weeks before his disappearance, Jake Morstan flew to _London_.”

“And what is so spectacular about that?” Donovan huffed.

“Maybe he meant to pay you a surprise visit?” Lestrade suggested, looking at Mary.

“I was in Kazakhstan then, and still living in New York anyway. And my father himself was teaching in Berlin at the time.”

“Seriously, he could have been doing a million things here. And it will be difficult to reconstruct his steps of more than one year ago,” Donovan sneered.

“As usual you don’t listen attentively enough, Donovan. What are the chances, that Morstan comes here - and let’s assume that he _did_ meet with Sholto - and vanishes practically the moment he sets foot on Iraqi soil again? The man had been living there for years! So we figured...”

“That _Sholto_ was responsible for his disappearance? This gets more far-fetched by the minute, and it’s impossible to prove.”

“You will find that the money transfers ended with my father’s sudden disappearance, which is at least noteworthy.” Mary was quite calm now, but John remembered her turning white as a sheet when they had first found out about the journey to London, and possibly to Sholto, and placed it in the chronology.

“Well, it wouldn’t be the first time one of two partners in crime tried to... get rid of the other – or that a blackmailer was put away by his victim, that’s for sure,” Lestrade put in. “And Sholto would have had the connections to arrange for something, I suppose.”

“You are aware that you are just offering another motive for Miss Morstan to have wanted Bartholomew Sholto dead, aren’t you?” Donovan commented.

“Donovan, shut up.” Lestrade said tiredly. “How... no, _why_ did you return to the villa tonight?”

“Yesterday, we finally managed to find evidence of packages that travelled from Iraq to Pondicherry. Tad had ordered his father’s secretary, though his lawyer, to give us access to the company’s logistics data. And then I suddenly knew.”  
“You knew _what_?” Donovan couldn’t help asking.

“You said it yourself, Greg.” John leaned forward in his chair. “It was a classic perfect murder. That there was no time for - how did you put it? - a complicated vanishing act. So all things considered, the only conclusion that fit _all_ the facts was that the murderer _had_ never left the building.”

“All right.”

“So, having tracked the deliveries to the villa _itself_ , and taking into account that little seal that Sholto had with him when he died  - he surely had not taken an item like that to a party boat - we concluded that the loot, or part thereof, was actually being kept in Pondicherry Road. But not on display, that was for sure. A secret room inside the villa seemed the only possible explanation. A room that was hidden well enough to escape even your people’s notice, which meant that it could also be where the murderer had waited out the police’s departure after killing Bart Sholto. Of course, we didn’t expect her to have died there!”

Lestrade nodded, and Donovan finished taking some notes. They had their work cut out after this interview, checking all they’d told them.

“Is there _anything_ else? Miss Morstan? John?”

They both shook their heads.

“All right. That’s it. For now. You may be of assistance to us, Miss Morstan. And I suggest that you aspire to be, because your actions so far were not entirely legal – much less wise. You two will not take any steps in this matter anymore. And you are not to leave London. Or I _will_ arrest you. Do you understand?”

They nodded.

 

Lestrade made good on his threat - or promise, depending on your point of view, - two days later. After that day at NSY, John had slept a decent night’s sleep for the first time he could remember in a _very_ long time, and immediately fled to work.

When a man limped in the next day in the afternoon, revealing a prosthetic leg to him, his first thought was of Sholto’s paranoid, and yet unexplained, fear of one-legged men. John shook his head at himself and set to examine the slightly inflamed skin in immediate contact with the artificial limb. The man seemed in excellent physical condition, apart from the amputation. Which could be no older than a year, John guessed.

“Not too fit yourself,” the man remarked in broad American, nodding at John’s cane.

He shrugged, then decided to return the rudeness. “C-car accident?”

“Motorbike.”

“Well, Mr. Small. This should help with the s-soreness. But you need to see an orthopaedic sp-specialist and have your prosthesis adjusted.”

There was a knock on the door to the treatment room. “Is there anything else?” John enquired of his patient. Small seemed to consider for a moment, but shook his head then and opened the door.

“Doctor Watson? There’s a DI Lestrade for you.”

Half an hour later, John was on his way out of the city, in an unmarked car, containing also Mary, and the inevitable Sergeant Donovan.

“Aren’t Mary and I supposed to _not_ be leaving the city?” John couldn’t resist asking.

Donovan rolled her eyes. “Stop being obtuse, John.”

Mary gave him a conspiratorial smile. At least things were moving on again. And they would be moving even faster, very soon...

 

Confronted with the results that Lestrade’s team had got in the last 48 hours, and Mary’s more personally motivated questioning, Tad Sholto was soon convinced to stop protesting absolute ignorance. It also helped that his lawyer advised cooperation with the police.

“We have evidence that Jake Morstan visited your father in spring of last year,” Lestrade bluffed, handing Sholto a picture of Mary’s father. It was obviously taken at some official event, the man wearing a tux that looked a little odd against his darkly tanned skin.

“Yes, I know. I looked him up on the Internet,” Tad addressed Mary, then looked away. “At first Bart and I thought, that he had threatened the Major, you see. Because shortly after that visit that cursed paranoia of his began!”

“So, my father _did_ blackmail your father? Is that what you’re saying?”  
“That seemed the most likely explanation to us then, too, but no. Not the way the Major talked about your father on his deathbed.” Tad lit the third cigarette. “I already explained to you my father and I were not particularly close. But Bart told me that our father had told _him_ that he and Jack Morstan were together in some smuggling scheme that was going to make them both rich, and famous. I admit I was privately wondering how much of it was delirium, but now...”

“My father vanished off the face of the earth a few weeks after that visit, Sholto. And I want to know if your father had something to do with that!” Mary was not interested in hearing Tad’s excuses, or explanations, for not putting all cards on the table right away.

“That’s nonsense! I can totally see how you come to this conclusion, but he can’t have! My father fell sick, and feared for his own life ever since your father disappeared. Of course, I didn’t make the connection then, but _now_ all this matches up perfectly! Someone threatened my father, and now she’s killed... now she’s killed Bart instead.”

Tad looked off balance, blue veins showing clearly against the utterly pale skin of his temples, pulsing slightly.

“Let’s hope that was the end of it,” Mary retorted rather coolly. “So after your father mentioned it, shortly before his death, you and your brother decided to come to me because you hoped to learn what had happened to the _Treasure of Nimrud_?”

“Yes, of course. Bart said that it was not at Pondicherry Lane, so... we hoped that there might be more information on your end.”

“Do I understand you correctly? You _knew_ about the secret room containing your father’s illegal collection of art and antiquities?” Lestrade’s voice was sharp. “You could well have saved the life of that young woman if you had chosen to share that information with us!”

Tad’s colourless eyes took on an utterly unrepentant glaze. “I didn’t know she was in there. And besides, she killed my brother.”

And that was that. Tad’s lawyer ended the interview and sent them on their way again.

 

John’s thoughts were swirling. The vague picture Mary and he had constructed over the last weeks had proved mostly accurate. But Sholto’s assertions certainly threw doubt on their blackmailing hypothesis (which had been feeble to start with) and even more so on the theory that the Major had done away with his business partner. It was not so much the sentimentality that Sholto had apparently exhibited on his deathbed that swayed John’s opinion, but the simple fact that the treasure had not been in Sholto’s possession (yet) when the archaeologist had gone missing.

John supposed that Mary was thinking along more or less the same lines. She seemed distant and distraught (which he understood full well). But he had the impression that she was avoiding his eye, and _that_ was not very much like her, he thought, and therefore a bit unsettling.

As they left the block of flats where Tad Sholto currently resided, crossing the parking lot, Lestrade fell in step with John, trailing behind the women.

“John.” He hesitated. “We still haven’t been able to identify the dead girl. Sholto had hundreds of business contacts that we’re currently checking, but no solid leads so far. But there has to be something. I doubt that she was acting on her own.”

“Hm.”

“Well. I just want you to be alert. Just in case someone is not content with Sholto’s death. Smuggling is a dangerous business. As you know well.”

John shrugged. “I’ll talk to her.”

“Do keep an eye on her.”

John made a noncommittal noise. He was not going to explain that Lestrade’s assumptions about him and Mary were inaccurate. Surely not with Donovan within earshot. And although he had every intention of talking to Mary, the opportunity simply shouldn’t arise anymore before the case reached its crisis.

 

Lestrade dropped him off at Baker Street. Or rather, he expected to drop him _and_ Mary off there, but she sat back and shook her head.

“Sorry, too much work,” she smiled, still not meeting John’s eye. She gave him a peck on the cheek when he got out of the car.

Returning from his night shift later, he found that he was a bit... astonished that Mary was not there. It was also then that John suddenly realised that, strangely enough, they had never exchanged telephone numbers, so short of stopping by her place in the middle of the night, he had no way of contacting her.

The next day, he called the Oriental Archaeology department where Mary was working. The secretary informed him, in astonishing rudeness, that Dr. Morstan was not available, and had not been in for the last two and a half days. Which apparently aggravated the lady a great deal.

It also aggravated John, whose subconscious was growing restless all through the day; and he was not given to forebodings, and the ones he _had_ concerned people who took risks without thinking.

The flat was empty again when he returned almost twenty hours later, after midnight and fell into a fitful sleep.

The next morning he was woken by a frantic Mrs Hudson, who had received a call from the clinic since they had not been able to contact John on his mobile (he no longer cared about recharging regularly, and had forgotten to do so for days, he realised). There had been a pile-up on the M4 and he was needed at work immediately.

It was pitch dark outside, when John got back home again. He snatched up his mobile on the way from where Mrs Hudson had plugged it in, tutting, in the morning. He noticed the small screen flashing a note that he’d gotten a text as he was hauling himself up the stairs, praying for the flat to be.... He stopped dead in his tracks.

Someone knocked at the door. John frowned, glad that he had not got further than the landing yet, turned on his cane and walked back down the hallway.

“Dr. Watson?”

John did a quick check of the woman before him. In her early fifties, with a face that showed regular summer holidays under a blazing sun and the careful grooming of a aesthetician, wearing heavy pearl earrings that dragged on her earlobes, and wearing tight jeans and a ponytail, she looked disturbingly like a combination of rich widow and schoolgirl.

“Yes.”

“Joanne Forrester. I’m here because of Mary, Mary Morstan.”

“I do have a phone.” Well, _that_ had sounded less than courteous. John found he didn’t care.

“We couldn’t find out your number. She-she said to get you. I think she has been followed for days, and now she’s afraid.”

“You... you are her flatmate.”  
“Her landlady, and housemate. Yes.” Joanne Forrester waved her beringed hands impatiently. “And tonight someone was sneaking around the house.”

John felt the hairs on his arms stand, looking down at the text that Lestrade had sent in the morning.

_IDed the girl. Name of Ann Daman. American citizen. Daughter of Iraq veteran, Sergeant Jonathan Small._

Cursing profusely John got up the stairs in record time, and was back almost immediately. If Joanne Forrester was wondering what he had taken the detour to get, she knew better than to ask.

The ride to Joanne’s house passed in tense silence, after John had told her in no unclear terms what he thought of leaving Mary alone in a situation like this. The woman indignantly explained that Mary had practically sent her away, and besides, Mary was very well able to call the police any moment she chose to, herself.

_But she hasn’t done that. She’s sent the only other inhabitant of the house away. She wants to-_ John felt his stomach turn, and snarled that Joanne drive faster.

 

Ten minutes and one shot from his handgun later, John was pacing the rather close confines of Mrs Forrester’s living room. His leg hurt like hell, and he had probably sprained his wrist during his fight with the struggling brute but luckily he did not really feel the pain right now, because he was too fucking angry. With Mary, and with himself, because it was _fucking_ Mr Small he’d had to pry from Mary’s throat.

“You put yourself out as a bait!” Anger was making him harsh. “You knew the one-legged man would only make his move if you were alone, and _that_ was why you sent Joanne away.”

“We _had_ to catch him, or we would never find out-“

John was almost too furious to speak. “We could have been too late. He could have killed you, as well.”

“Unlikely, he wanted information.”

“Are you _mad_?” he shouted.

“John.”

“We could have planned this together, developed a decent strategy.”  
“I didn’t want to draw you any deeper into this. You’re in so much trouble because of me already!”

“You didn’t trust me.”

“That’s not true!” Suddenly her face fell, and the enormity of the danger she had put herself in hit her. “I’m sorry.”

“You-“

Maybe it was a good thing that the police arrived at that moment. John heard the ruckus at the doorway, Joanne’s rather shrill voice answering some questions and getting closer, and then the living room door opened, and seconds later two of Lestrade’s underlings half-carried Small from his temporary prison in Joanne’s broom cupboard.

In hindsight, telling Joanne to ask for DI Lestrade was possibly not the best of ideas. For the second time in the course of a week, John was subjected to some serious shouting on Lestrade’s part. It sounded suspiciously like what _he_ had just screamed at Mary. Apart from the trust part. John couldn’t even think what had made him say that. No, say it _like_ that.

He stood his ground fairly well, he thought, until the sergeant from hell returned from her chat with Mary.

“How could you be so stupid!” Lestrade was saying for what felt like the tenth time. “I _warned_ you. And you thought you ought to handle this yourself? Have you learnt _nothing_ from Soo Lin’s death?” The low blow was so very unlike Lestrade, that John was too surprised to even feel it for a second.

“Oh. Miss Morstan steadfastly maintains that John didn’t know what was going on,” Donovan interjected helpfully.

“Isn’t that _sweet,_ ” Lestrade grated.

“Unless, of course, she’s just trying to get him off the hook, because lying in wait for someone with an illegal firearm is quite something else than acting out of self-defence.”

But Lestrade didn’t seem to listen, his eyes were riveted to the weapon John had placed on the table, with its magazine removed. He was white in the face, reaching for it.

“Sir? Shouldn’t I get an evidence bag for that?”

Lestrade examined the gun, silently. And slid it into his pocket “What the fuck am I supposed to do now,” he said so very lowly, that only John could hear. And then, loudly enough to make it an order for his sergeant: “Let’s follow Small to the hospital and see if we get anything out of him tonight.”

Donovan stared after her boss in almost comical bewilderment.

“And that’s it?” she demanded of Lestrade’s retreating back. “How can you possibly let him walk-“

“Sergeant.”

“I don’t get it! He _shot_ at someone.” Lestrade did not respond. “Why are you _mollycoddling_ him? It’s not like he is special. It’s not like he’s able to help us with anything. Why, _sir_ , are we tolerating this? He’s not Sherlock fucking Holmes.”

Lestrade turned on her so quickly, that Donovan took an alarmed step backwards. “Out. Now.”

 

Joanne Forrester had the good sense to provide some serious booze after the almost-catastrophe in her house. She made Mary and John sit down in the upstairs living room, she made them drink some horrible brandy (not a good idea on an empty stomach), and listened to a quite intermittent exchange of explanations and apologies (on Mary’s part) and invective and wordless expletives (on John’s). Mary had first suspected someone was following her after that day in custody. She had not been sure, she said. And... anyway. John felt the alcohol blur the edges of all the things that threatened to crash around his ears right now: The imminent end of the case, Lestrade _knowing_ , Donovan’s insinuations, Mary’s lack of trust, and the fact that he - John drew a deep breath, trying to get some air around the _missing_. How could he miss someone this much? God, he knew why he had never, not once, touched alcohol during those months...

“John, you look ready to tip over,” Mary said, and when John forced his eyes open to tell her she was wrong, and he was fine, and he needed to get back home, Joanne was already gone from the room, gone between his last two blinks. He sank back on the sofa, and was asleep before Mary returned with a blanket.

 

It was not Sherlock’s voice that woke him (although he _did_ in his dream see him silhouetted, with his hand reaching towards him, against the icy blue of the sky). Sherlock’s voice was too welcome in the subconscious part of his brain that he held responsible for producing dreams, nightmares, and all kinds of synaptic crashes during the last almost, fifteen months. Hearing Sherlock’s voice would never send a jolt of panic through him, John was sure. He’d never want to realise that it had to be a dream if he heard it.

Hearing _Moriarty’s_ voice, though, was quite another matter.

And he heard his voice. _All my life I’ve been searching for distractions._ _You were the best distraction and now I don’t even have you._ _Because I’ve beaten you._ Quietly, a whisper, and a shout at the same time, that made his eyes snap open, and roused him from sleep so quickly, that his consciousness was not quite there with him.

That _voice_ , from the bedroom. John padded through the dark, only partly aware of what he was doing.

Mary was there, but he did not even notice, as he sat frozen, his hands tucked under his thighs, and unable to look at the laptop screen, as the voices were drilling into his head, words he had never heard before, tinny like a rather bad recording turned to full volume.

Acid crawled up his throat as the images of Sherlock falling flickered through his memory again, vivid against the background of Sherlock’s and Moriarty’s voice. All he could do was stay still as stone.

There was a bit of quiet, and then Sherlock’s sudden, growing laugh ran down his spine, making the fine hairs stand on end. He shuddered, when the sensation reached the small of his back. _I don’t have to die... if I’ve got you._ The confidence audible in Sherlock’s tone kicked his heart to a fast, desperate rhythm, while he listened to Moriarty’s derisive retort. All he could think was, had Moriarty been right about Sherlock, he would have flown, not dropped like a stone, and ended in blood and shattered bone on a sidewalk.

And then, suddenly there was a shot, and he heard Mary Morstan gasp in shock at the video pictures, and feel her hand on his shoulder.

John raised his eyes, needing to see Moriarty dead, the damage the bullet had done to his head. But all his eyes were willing to fixate was a tall figure in a too warm coat, staring down at the madman’s body, stepping onto the parapet surrounding the roof. And then he was gone and there was... just nothing. Not even the sound of falling, because the clatter as the mobile hit the tar paper drowned out all else.

And of course, this was completely wrong.

John was not usually given to useless gestures, but his fingers were half way to the screen when Mary caught them. She said something to him, shutting the laptop, and he was saying something back. In fact, he started telling her what was going through his head, and he had no idea, _what_ exactly that even was, nor did he remember later.

His memory picked up again, when he was holding Mary very close, and the kiss... happened. He was never sure what it was supposed to be, to mean. And, although he might not be as clever as Sherlock, he knew a lifeline when he saw one; and he was not gone far enough either not to grab it.


	22. Proof

It was like going back in time – or falling out of it- sitting in Ella’s practice, watching her face as she settled into her comfortable chair and consulted her little notebook. The quiet and the memories connected to these surroundings grated on John’s nerves, and he willed himself not to fiddle with his shirt cuff to better hide the splint he had improvised in the morning. His wrist hurt, stinging. Of course he’d had to ruin his _left_ hand. He’d need to take a break from the clinic. He might have to do that anyway...

Maybe it would have been better _not_ to have seen that video, at all. He didn’t hold it against Mary, though, who could not possibly have known what it would do to him (she surely could have done well without witnessing the scene playing out in her bedroom that night...).

Anyone who’d seen those images and followed that conversation could reach only two conclusions: One, Moriarty had set Sherlock up. Two, Sherlock was a narcissistic madman. (Quite possibly part of the reason, why Ella thought of him the way she did, as well.)

Watching it a _second_ time had clearly been a mistake, but without an alternative, really. There were very few moments in John’s life he had such accurate - painstakingly so - memories of as those. And reconciling the images playing before his eyes with those was putting his brain on a loop, stuck on the impossibility of what he _knew_ should have been on that screen, and what _was_.

So they had watched the footage one more time. Together. Because John had _begged_ her. He felt red creep into his cheeks remembering it, even now. Whether this was for the begging, or the desperate need he had felt to see those images one more time, he was not entirely sure.

No matter how much he feared what seeing the picture again could do to him (Sherlock stepping down from that parapet with that little spring had been one of the worst things John could imagine seeing again, because – why had he stepped down from there once, and then not done it again, but jumped? It was like watching one’s dream come true – knowing that this was _not_ how the tale was going to end.) - the impossibility of what he had seen was driving him up the wall. He needed proof that he was not turning truly mad now; how was it possible that Moriarty’s insane litany included no threats, only flattery and disdain towards Sherlock in equal measures, no talk of killing John, or anyone else to coerce him?

Viewing it another time didn’t change anything about that, of course, and John fled into the comparatively empty streets of London two hours before sunrise. leaving Mary behind without so much as a word of explanation, although he was vaguely aware that he ought to to make clear now that he was not angry with her but he couldn’t think of anything to say. He was gripped by the ice-cold fear that he had got it wrong about Sherlock jumping in order to save John, Mrs Hudson and Lestrade, after all; that Mycroft had decided to leave him his delusions, maybe thinking that it was in his own best interest. So caught up was he in contemplating the dreadful corollaries of that possibility (and stoking up anger bordering on murderous rage towards Mycroft), that it took almost an hour for it to register:

The footage _was_ a fake, or at least an edited version, because their last phone call was missing. And there was no way he was wrong about remembering _that._

So lost was he in those seconds of footage that kept playing in his head without pause (and he knew that _this_ nightmare was going to stay, whether he was asleep, or awake; the tall dark shadow falling out of the picture... an opaque layer over everything he was seeing), that it was another two hours before the question of _who_ would have had any reason to change the evidence even crossed his mind.

 

“I should have shot him when I had the chance.” He sounded hoarse. He could almost feel the weight of his gun, as it had lain in his hand the night before, feel the recoil of the shot in his palm.

Ella cocked her head slightly. “Are you talking about James Moriarty?”

“Of course I am. That sick fuck...” John’s voice broke. “Getting out of it all so easily.”

“Oh.” Ella stilled. “You would have _killed_ for Sherlock Holmes without a second thought, wouldn’t you?”

“I have.”

The admission was out of his mouth before he could consider if it was really wise to share this fact with Ella. “And believe me, killing Moriarty would have been _much_ easier.”

“Would it, now,” she murmured, very slowly, watching him closely.

“You think that’s... inappropriate, don’t you?”

“Don’t _you_?”

But there was no way John was going to step back with an _apology_ from this. He’d give just about anything to change those few seconds of the past, to be able to step up to Moriarty and press the muzzle of his gun between his eyes. And there was still not a shadow of a doubt in him that it would have been the right thing to pull the trigger.

“It’s the _only_ thing I have ever been good at. Keeping an eye on people that aren’t safe.”

“Well. Not Sherlock,” Ella remarked.

“I _did_ protect Mary,” John snapped, unable to keep his promise to himself to leave Mary out of this discussion, even though he knew that Ella had provoked him.

“How nice of you. Any casualties?” She sounded oddly angry, continuing before he could get out a word.

“I didn’t shoot the man, if that’s what you’re thinking. But Lestrade knows now... that I shot the cabbie back then, I mean.” John felt his head swimming; it was all too much, and he cursed Anthea’s unexpected appearance that had brought him here, over-tired and too preoccupied to deal with Ella’s assaults.

“Of course that was what I was thinking. It doesn’t seem like you are very much aware of what you’re doing anymore! Talking about shooting at people, _saving_ people,” Ella paused. “You _are_ a dangerous man, in these surroundings, anyway... for all your decent appearance, and the moral high ground you like to occupy.”

 “I merely did as you told me,” he pointed out, weakly.

“What a brilliant culmination of all that’s important in your head,” Ella said acidly. “That’s the only rationale you know, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Following imaginary _orders_ – and then feeling utterly innocent in your actions.”

“As long as it’s _your_ orders, you surely don’t seem to mind, though!” John shot back.

“That’s rich! I _do_ mind, very much! That you _use_ me to excuse your outrageous behaviour. That you use the noble fiction of protecting people to seek the danger you’re addicted to.”

“I won’t let you blame me for listening to your advice!” John replied, quietly. “You are supposed to help me see what is the right thing to do. You _told_ me to help Mary Morstan. And now you’re angry  with me? Well, thank you, I really don’t need you to point out how many times and in how many ways I’ve brilliantly fucked up,” he snarled. “I’ve figured that one out myself!”

“Oh, stop pitying yourself,” Ella said, not impressed at all. “I thought we’d left this behind us by now. Just do everyone a favour and _don’t_ try and blame other people for your shortcomings, will you. And, please, _don’t_ try and convince me that this was about selflessly protecting others.

Because ‘That’s all you were ever good at’,” she mocked his words. “Because you weren’t. And you surely aren’t now, either.”

John was too furious to respond.

“You would have _loved_ to be the one to take James Moriarty out, put that bullet in his brains. You would have enjoyed it – even if you could only have done it as an act of revenge, ” Ella said, her tone clipped and cold. “That’s about as far from protective as it gets. Besides, you were the only one who explained your feelings as protectiveness, John. You know very well that _I_ think...“

“...what ev-veryone thinks,” John grated.

Ella smiled thinly. “And that astonishes you? Honestly? Because you aren’t making the slightest bit of sense anymore. Now less than ever; you have just admitted having _killed_ for him, for God’s sake, but you refuse to acknowledge the reasons why you were willing to. Why can’t you just own up to it?”

“How on earth can you expect me to?” John was bewildered by Ella’s apparently genuine puzzlement. “This past year, you have been taking everything that happened and twisted it and made me doubt the least little things about Sherlock and me. You keep judging him, you make me wonder what to think about him, you want me to question everything that ever happened. To the least, minute detail. And then you say I-“ Ella’s words hit an obstacle in his throat, and were sucked out of his mind as it suddenly flashed with the pictures perceived by no one but a lifeless piece of technology (security technology – what a joke) when it had mattered.

He drew a breath and tried again. “And then you expect me to... to say...” only to find he couldn’t say it out loud, not even in citation. “ _That_ really makes no sense at all if you were serious about your analyses of Sherlock before.”

“Is that so?” Ella queried. “I think, you are just annoyed with me (and probably furious with yourself) because you would rather I had gone on with - what did you call them? - _hate speeches_ about your friend than telling you a truth you can’t handle!

But since all you have ever been willing to talk about, concerning yourself, that is, was the guilt you feel. So, if that’s what it takes to make you say anything at all... you _bet_ I’ll play on this obsession with guilt of yours.”

“Is...” John felt the dead-tiredness creep through his body like a live thing, slowly draining the adrenaline high he had been running on since the footage. “Is this supposed to mean you weren’t serious about things you said about him?”

“John. You do know what therapy _is_ , don’t you? Therapy isme making you face _yourself_. Which you still haven’t done. It’s _not_ you criticising or censoring others’ opinions; nor is it analysing them to find a view of yourself you can agree with. So you’ll never get me to construe a ‘truth’ for you and your past. I won’t.”

She watched him in his frustrated silence at her evasion. “But I can tell you what I see when I look at you, sitting here like this, lost. Whatever you tell yourself, or me, whatever it was between the two of you, you _can’t_ deny that this goes deep.” He never _had_! “Reaching way beyond the trust issues you have used to keep yourself apart.” Ella  made a small pause.

“You told me once that,” she squinted at her little notebook, “the last time you trusted someone you barely just survived and three young men you felt responsible for died. Those trust issues you first came to me about have _nothing_ to do with that incident in Afghanistan you gave me as the reason, hoping for me to PTSD-label you and send you on your way. That was never true, and you’ve known that all this time. They are connected to something _much_ further than three years back in the past.”  
John curled his shaking fingers into a tight fist. “This has n-nothing to d-do with-“

“The hell it doesn’t,” she shut him up. “Because the last time you trusted someone, the man killed himself before your eyes. You haven’t let anyone in like you did with Sherlock for ages... I’d guess your entire adult life. But he _somehow,_ ” she managed to imbue the one little word with thick irony, “got past those barriers, made you let him in and change everything...”

The tocking sound of raindrops against the window seemed incredibly loud. When had it even begun to rain?

“And you think you can just disregard what I told you at his grave?”

John glared, silently. He was not going to admit what utter failure _Unthink_ had already turned out to be. And after last night, he knew it was gone for good, melted down under the weight of proof that the pictures, and even more so, the words constituted. John kept still as another wave of dizzy nausea swept through him.

“Well, I’m afraid that our time’s up for today. But one word of warning: If you think it’s going to go away by ignoring it, I can assure you, you’re in for a bad surprise.”

* * *

 

* * *

The sun burnt his neck, painting his sharply contoured shadow onto the sand, almost black against the blinding light all around. Looking out across the desert to the north, the desolate emptiness of the landscape was all there was. No trees, nothing moving, as far as the eye could see. If there was a place on earth more reminiscent of death, he couldn’t think of one – even leaving aside his own experience, or the knowledge that Morstan had been killed in a cave less than ten kilometres from here...

Shaking off the gloomy thoughts, he turned around, shadowing his eyes with his left hand, to take in the buzz of activity below the rise he had climbed to have a few minutes to himself.

The white and beige of headdresses were moving to and fro together with the wheelbarrows, and John wondered if he might need glasses soon. Another thing to feel old for...

Shortly before the sun reached its peak, there was a shout above the constant din of voices talking Arabic and English that carried well over the distance. “We’ve got it!” The din turned into jubilant shouts and whooping.

A minute later he could make out Mary hugging one of her colleagues and then determinedly trudging through the sand, looking for him. He stood and waved.

He couldn’t believe they’d pulled this off.

 

Hell, he couldn’t believe _he_ had pulled off getting through the past three weeks... He marvelled that he’d not only got through _that_ night (the one he had finally, accidentally, watched the footage that had, to the public, proven Sherlock’s innocence), but the one after that as well (the one Mary had mourned her father and his nightmares had returned), plus the day inbetween, where Ella had done her share, and Unthink had crashed for good.

But working oneself into a stupor clearly was a more powerful substitute drug (in his case, for _Unthink_ ) than John would ever have believed possible. Puzzling over Bart Sholto’s death, finding the dead girl, catching Small and figuring out everything else connected to the case Mary Morstan had brought him on that morning, not that long ago, had become _such_ a relief from the void in his head, that John had finally begun tounderstand Sherlock’s utter bliss at being freed from the maelstrom of his own mind.

He fervently hoped that wherever his best friend was now, that it was at least a place where he needn’t feel bored, for all eternity. The childishness of the thought annoyed John, but it was the one thing he really hoped for. Was there liberty in death? For Sherlock, in any way? He wanted to be able to believe that a mind that great could not simply dissolve; that Sherlock had withdrawn into that unique place his mind had constructed as a world of his own, before his last breath left his body and all his connections to this world were severed. Imagining him in what he called his mind palace was so much easier than facing the fact that John had stopped believing any such things existed, long ago.

* * *

Small’s injuries had not been life-threatening (John had made sure: he was _not_ some kind of berserk, no matter what Ella liked to think), and he had been able and - maybe more surprisingly – _willing_ to talk to the police when he woke up in hospital.

When John had come home to Baker Street, after therapy and some more walking, early in the afternoon, Mrs Hudson had assaulted him with teary eyes and a dish towel. How dare he give her such a scare? She’d heard him come home late the night before, but when she brought up breakfast that morning, to make sure he’d be in time for his appointment with Dr Thompson, she’d found the flat empty.

“And when I found your revolver was gone I...”

John gaped at his landlady, and after two futile attempts to reply to that, he settled for, “I’m sorry. I stayed over at Ms Morstan’s place.”

“Oh.” Mrs Hudson let the towel sink. “Oh! Mary! That’s brilliant, John.”

“Well.” He wished he felt as sure of that as his landlady was.

The loud knock at the door startled them both, but John could not have been more grateful for the interruption.

“Oh, Detective Inspector. Come in.”

“No. I’m just here to get Dr Watson.” Lestrade’s face gave nothing away.

John was out of sorts, his insides in painful knots (not to speak of his wrist), and another little kidnapping was _just_ the thing to further darken his spirits. All he wanted to do was crawl back into their flat and curl up on the sofa to _think_.

“Greg, I-” John tried, when he had closed the car door.

“Take it.” The DI held something out to him, then returned his concentration to threading into the traffic running past.

John took the envelope, frowning. “Where are we going?”

“Small has given his statement. And confessed, I believe.”

“You _believe_?” he asked, pulling out the contents of the envelope which bore his name and address. “What...”

“I’m afraid I’ve just sold my soul to get you this.” Lestrade lit himself a cigarette. “So, make sure you don’t talk about this with anyone, ever.”

John stared at the sheet of paper in his hand, dumbfounded. The FAC bore his picture, details on his army service, all other necessary information, and identified him as a marksman training with the British Pistol Club on a regular basis. It was also signed and stamped on the 11th of May 2011.

“I should have figured it out, really. He as good as _told_ me it was you,” Lestrade was saying, sounding honestly aggravated.

“To be fair, it was hard to hear the important bits under all that bluster, at times.”

Lestrade shot him a glance, almost colliding with the cab in front of them. “Still. It was so obvious. I’m sure I don’t know anyone else who would have killed for him.”

John felt his heart plummet to his feet. “Where are we going, again?”

“Small told us he was willing to come clear, but on his own terms. He asked that Sholto and Ms Morstan be present.”

“And what did he say?”

Lestrade shrugged. “I handed the case over for the greater good, that is, in order to avoid difficulties in the upcoming lawsuit.”

It took John a minute to get it. “Because of me, you mean? You – oh no. Not to _Donovan_!”

“Much good may it do her.”

John found he did not want to know if his Firearm Certificate had also been part of the trade. Owing that woman anything, or being dependent on her in some way was too dreadful to contemplate.

“Greg.”

“Yes?”

“Thank you for deleting his ‘note’,” he said. “The call,” he clarified, when Lestrade merely frowned in confusion.

“Note?” Lestrade had never been that good an actor. John wanted to slap himself, hard. Obvious. _Mycroft..._ “What are you talking about, John?”

Fortunately, they arrived at the hospital right then, before John could put his foot in any deeper.

They found Mary on the steps, alone. She looked wan. Sholto _had_ talked. He had confessed, to more than anyone had bargained for.

* * *

“We found them! I told you we would!” Mary told him, smiling and gasping from half-running up the rise. She wore the loose trousers and long-sleeved shirt that were pretty much mandatory for women working outdoors in Muslim countries, and, more sensibly than John, darkly tinted sunglasses. There was a marked difference between Mary in London and Mary in what John saw now was her natural habitat. They had spent part of the last week touring some of the archaeological sites in the vicinity, while they were waiting for the official business to be taken care of. And she seemed far more at home here in the desert: the heat, the dust, the _work_ than she ever had in the city. He had enjoyed her showing him around, telling complicated stories about times long past, jumping down into what she called ‘sections’ of archaeological expeditions long ago, and glowing with excitement whenever she detected some obscure sign of this event or that period’s ending that John couldn’t see for the life of him, reading wars and occupations, siege and a new belief system in dirt and shards...

John pulled her into a quick - in this heat ill-adivsed - sticky hug. Mary drew back making a mock-disgruntled noise, and beckoned him to follow her.

“Come on, you have to be there when we open the boxes.”

All this walking through the desert with a cane had made John deeply sympathetic with poor Sisyphos; as he was following Mary now down towards the old section where they’d started working yesterday, he once again noted appreciatively how she neither waited for him nor offered any sort of assistance. Adapting her pace to his when they took actual walks together was the only consideration she ever seemed to give his damned limp.

When they arrived on site, the local workmen had moved three aluminium crates to a couple of rocks surfacing from the sand at intervals.

“Mary, the honour should be yours,” Dr Svenson said, standing back and beaming broadly at her. John snorted, fighting the urge to trip Sonnyboy up with his cane.

The latches snapped open at the first attempt. John found he was holding his breath, when the lid opened to a hoard of gold and precious stone objects embedded in paper and wood wool. Mary stared, looking a little lost for a moment, but didn’t touch any of the items. “Let’s get these to base.”

“Will you be famous now, to go with being rich?” John asked, teasingly, a minute later, when they were following the men carrying the boxes to the jeeps.

“I’d rather be neither.” She looked away. It had not been the best of things to say. Nothing alluding to her father was. It had been a difficult month for Mary, as well, John reminded himself, climbing aboard the decommissioned, old army truck after her. She didn’t care enough about money to forgive her father...

* * *

_Transcript of the statement given by Jonathan Small._

_DS Donovan: “So, Mr Small. Tell us about your role in the deaths of John Sholto, his son Bartholomew Sholto, and Ann Daman.”_

_Jonathan Small: “I didn’t kill anyone.”_

_Dr Mary Morstan: “But you know why all those people are dead.”_

_J.S.: “’Course I do. Because of the damned treasure.”_

_Dr Morstan: “The treasure you were supposed to save! One of the most important finds ever made in Iraq, and an important part of their cultural heritage, their identity!”_

_J.S.: “Ah, right. I’ll tell what: The Iraqis looted their own fucking heritage! They stole everything that weighed less than a ton. Breaking the precious stones from the artefacts, or selling them to some antiquities dealer. And we are the bad guys now? We actually did go there to protect that museum, we were supposed to risk our lives for their heritage. You know what? That’s bullshit. We were so few, and besides, I do not shoot civilians. There were children gathering whatever they thought might be worth something. No. Not for a few old stones and statues. I don’t.”_

_Dr Morstan: “So you’re the heroes, are you? Because stealing the artefacts from the Nimrud Treasure was really just an act of protecting them from the barbaric Iraqis?”_

_Jonathan Small: “We weren’t the ones who stole it from the Museum! We caught a group of them carrying the boxes out. So, you see, even if we hadn’t been there to take it, the stuff would have vanished down some channel or other, nonetheless. Your father… he was the real criminal.”_

_DS Donovan: “Sit down, Dr Morstan. Sit! ... Just tell us what happened, Mr Small.”_

_J.S.: “Course you don’t like hearing that. I wouldn’t either. He saw us that night at the Museum, and we were fucked. He reported us to the Major, and that was that. Discharged dishonourably, though they shushed the whole thing up pretty well. And going to jail, too. You have no idea what that was like. It’s not like we harmed anyone, and they put us in with murderers and… As a soldier, you’re not necessarily popular with the common conmen, I can tell you. They feel they have to prove you’re no longer the commander of anything in there. But that was… well, it had the feel of justice about it, you know. It was when we found out that Morstan and Sholto had turned the tables that we knew we couldn’t let them get away with it.”_

_DS Donovan: “And how did you find out about that, Mr Small?”_

_J.S.: “I saw them. I was just out of prison and lurking around the place a bit when I saw Morstan visiting. And suddenly I got it. It was all so simple! You know, the boxes had been gone from where we put them that night for safe-keeping. We couldn’t carry the stuff around all the time, so we found a hiding place, part of an old, disused tunnel. But when they caught us, we did tell them where. We wrote down the exact coordinates, of course. But, surprise, surprise: It was gone.”_

_DS Donovan: “And the judge didn’t believe you?”_

_J.S.: “Of course not. Anyway. When I saw that fucker, Dr Morstan that is, that day in London, I just knew that they had tricked us. That archaeologist was forever going on about the precious stuff we had to guard, blah blah. If he had seen and reported us, well, that would have been bad luck, but, I wondered, where was the treasure then? Only explanation that made any sense to me was he’d made sure it wasn’t there anymore when people came looking; which was easy for him, I guess.”_

_Dr Morstan: “But you had no proof! How do you know that is what really happened? And where… where is my father?”_

_J.S.: “Right. I didn’t. But Sholto’s reaction to my visit, and my words, were quite confirmation enough for me. I wrote Pete about it, and he said he’d take care of things with Morstan.”_

_DS Donovan: “Pete?”_

_J.S.: “You see, we were four that night. Not the three that Morstan saw. His first mistake. So Pete got out of it, but he felt pretty bad for us going to prison. When I wrote to him what I figured Morstan and the Old Major had done, he took steps. He just needed to be alone with Morstan for a bit, to convince him to talk. Unfortunately, your dad wasn’t really up to any interrogation, it seems. I mean, he did tell Pete things. Who told me afterwards. But when Pete came back to that cave one morning, he was dead as a stone.”_

_DS Donovan: “And Pete hastily buried him somewhere so that he wasn’t found?”_

_J.S.: “Waste of time. No one was going to find him in that hole. Certainly not before he was beyond identifying. Anyway, it was only an accident. Pete sure didn’t mean to kill him before we knew what he had done with the crates!”_

_DS Donovan: “So, your... confederate had not learnt anything about where the treasure was?”_

_J.S.: “Morstan admitted to the scheme he had running with Sholto. The Major had gone back to England, and with Morstan staying in Iraq, they made sure to wait till grass had grown over the whole affair. There was this lawyer-turned-soldier the Army sent in to investigate the lootings during the occupation of Baghdad, it was all over the news for some time. So they lay low for quite some time. But then they started, carefully, smuggling out some items, always hidden amongst other finds, from official sites that went to Berlin for restoration, or with the technical equipment that was moved back and forth on a regular basis.”_

_DS Donovan: “Do you know anything about the plans they had once the collection-“_

_Interruption by Dr Morstan: “Hoard.”_

_“-collection was complete?”_

_J.S.: “I do. Only what Pete got out of Morstan, but when I confronted the Major, he as good as confirmed it was true. I wonder if the old wanker was more shaken by Morstan’s death, or the fact that the treasure was lost again.”_

_Dr Morstan: “You mean, my father was the only one who knew where it is now?”_

_J.S.: “Must have been. And Pete couldn’t find anything in his things, his room, there was nothing! No hint either.”_

_DS Donovan: “So you threatened Sholto?”_

_J.S.: “Didn’t have to do anything much. Just lurking around where he was. Sholto even tried to strike a deal with Pete and me – as if we’d collaborate with a traitor. I gave him a piece of my mind, and he seemed pretty upset afterwards. Started hiding in his damned fucking castle of a villa. But I have time. I made sure he’d not forget about what he’d done.”_

_Dr Morstan: “You didn’t take the money he offered?”_

_J.S.: “This was not about money. He destroyed our fucking lives! Jim Daman died in prison, I’m crippled, Pete fell in a partisan attack a month after your father died. And Sam’s gone off the rails, when his wife left him with the kids.”_

_Dr Morstan: “But you wanted the treasure?”_

_J.S.: “Yes. Yes, we did. Because_ they _surely had no right to it. Their plan was kind of brilliant, I guess, abstractly speaking. You see, they were not only after making money! They were arranging for an unforgettable rediscovery, spinning a tale of a breathtaking treasure hunt, that was going to earn your father fame and professional recognition.”_

_Dr Morstan: “That makes no sense. My father could have got the same by bringing forward the treasure in 2003!”_

_J.S.: “Really? I don’t think so. Your father was a far more cunning man than you give him credit for. For one thing, a treasure missing for a decade is so much more popular with the press. If he had reported us to the officials, all he’d have got would be a handshake, before the Army would have made sure that no word of the incident got out. There were enough image problems with that war without a confirmed case of us looting. More importantly, this way they could cash in the Iraqi government’s reward in addition to the millions they were going to make on the illegal market!”_

_DI Donovan: “How was that supposed to work?”_

_J.S.: “It seems that they already had a buyer ready and waiting, some big boss in the illegal antiquities market. They would cash the first payment, maybe the rest as well, if they got to dictate enough of the terms – and then your father was meant to bring customs and the police to the handover, the perfect hero who saved a decisive part of Iraq’s heritage. I don’t think he’d ever have problems again finding sponsors, do you?”_

_DI Donovan: “So you were determined to get the treasure back, but Jack Morstan’s death made it impossible for you to find it. What was your plan?”_

_Dr Morstan: “You wanted to see for yourself how much of it was already here, in London, didn’t you?”_

_J.S.: “I didn’t trust your father, or Sholto, any further than I can fly. So when I heard of Sholto’s death, I figured the way was open for some covert operation. Infiltrating his fucking castle.”_

_DI Donovan: “And you recruited James Daman’s daughter?”_

_J.S.: “Oh, there was not much recruitment necessary. Ann was like a daughter to me, too. But when she heard, from Pete, what had happened... I couldn’t deny her the chance at revenge. And she should never have come to harm, anyway. Probably wouldn’t have if you, Dr Morstan and your friend Dr Watson had not meddled.”_

_Dr Morstan: “Because she hid in the secret room from us, you mean?”_

_J.S.: “Exactly.”_

_DI Donovan: “You planned for her to be taken home by Bartholomew Sholto so she could find out about the collection kept in the villa? How could you even be sure he’d pick her of all the girls on that party boat?”_

_J.S.: “I watched that house for months. I learnt a lot of things about John Sholto, and his son. The one living there, I mean. It was obvious Ann would be able to- Well, you know. She was meant to sound him out, slip the drug into his drink, have a look around maybe... But obviously things didn’t work out.”_

_DI Donovan: “No, they surely didn’t. She killed Bartholomew Sholto, be it accidentally or because he caught her doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing. And then hid in the secret room, which must have been open at the time, and shut the door behind her. Unfortunately the system has the peculiarity that you need to enter the keycode for exiting, as well.”_

_J.S.: “She died of thirst, then?”_

_Dr Morstan: “She did. And not because of John and me, but because you didn’t tell the police that she must still have been in there!”_

_J.S.: “You think I stayed around while the police were swarming the place? When I came back later, I couldn’t be sure if Ann was actually still in the building. She could have gone into hiding anywhere. I had no idea what had happened.”_

_DI Donovan: “Calm down, Mr Small. So when your confederate remained untraceable... What did you do? Did you go after Dr Morstan here right away?”_

_J.S.: “Bullshit. I didn’t know who you were, when I saw you and Tad Sholto, after Ann had gone in with Bart. But when you and Dr Watson came back to the villa alone, that night you found her body, I realised you were not there by accident the first time, either. And when you were released from Scotland Yard, I followed you and your friend around a bit, Miss Morstan.”_

_Dr Morstan: “You could have saved yourself the bother. In fact, I don’t know anything about this, at all.”_

_J.S.: “Pity. Well, I guess someone will find the stuff again by accident in a hundred years, then. I’m sorry that Sholto’s boy died: that was not necessary, or planned. But Sholto and your father? No great loss, really.”_

_DI Donovan: “I think that’s all for now. Take him back to his cell.”_

* * *

“John?” Mary gave him a nudge. John was standing in the yard of their temporary field base. He had been watching, from a shadowy corner, as the crates were unloaded carefully and carried inside. “Pre-occupied?”

He took her hand and didn’t let go again. “I was. Thinking... about... something.“

“Oh, really! Should I guess?”

“No.”

“So, tell me, what _are_ you thinking?”

“I think Mr Geographic is going to combust if you aren’t there with him in thirty seconds.”

“Ptht.”

“Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven...”

“I don’t want to.”

“Part of the deal,” he reminded her.

“I know... All right.” She used their still linked hands to pull him into the building (cheekily called a ‘hotel’ by their landlord) after her.

 

This was going to be headlines. Well-controlled (by the Government himself), not entirely truthful news, but the essentials would be right: A long lost treasure returned to its rightful owners, the Iraqi people, and a few hundreds of newly discovered, invaluable artefacts rescued from where looters had hidden their bounty during the war; all thanks to investigations in a murder-turned-smuggling case professionally handled by NSY in collaboration with Dr Morstan of Oxford’s Oriental Insitute and Dr Svenson of Yale.

The early thirties journalist accompanying their little expedition virtually burst with excitement, adjusting and readjusting chairs for his exclusive interview, while his not much older, but visibly much more world-weary, photographer quietly prepared for a series of shoots.

John was watching from the sidelines, when Mary turned up at his side.

“What is wrong, John? Why are you so sad today?”

“It feels like some kind of ending,” he admitted, feeling extremely… stupid. And vulnerable. They were going to go home, the case was closed...

Mary searched his face, not taken in by his attempt at making the observation sound casual, and probably seeing too much again, considering how briefly they had known each other. “You _have_ figured out that I’ve fallen in love with you, right?”

“Oh. Have you?”

She gave a laugh. “You’re an idiot, John.”

“Dr Morstan!” The journalist called her away.

 

Mary kept rolling her eyes despondently, but she and Stephen (Svenson) went through the inevitable posing with the finds cooperatively. John chuckled, eliciting a real smile from her, and made sure not to draw anyone’s attention.

“The story of the discovery of a previously unknown part of the world-famous _Treasure of Nimrud_ seems more like fiction than anything that happens in real life. Now that all secrecy can be abandoned and the artefacts are safe again, could you please tell us this incredible story in full, Dr Morstan?”

“Well, it started with four men taking what they, probably rightfully so, thought was an unique opportunity to get their hands on something invaluable...” Mary started on a tale that was as close to the truth as was possible without incriminating her via her connection to her father. And it all sounded conclusive: she really _was_ a damned good liar when she chose to be, John realised.

She had been far from this detached when they had finally learnt the truth about her father’s involvement, and his end.

Lestrade had given John a copy of the transcript. The scheme was not complicated, at all, but the beginning of it was something Sherlock would have loved, John assumed. Small and three comrades had patrolled the streets surrounding the National Museum. None of them had _planned_ for anything to happen. They weren’t thieves.

Until they got their hands on a treasure.

_The soft, swishing sound of heavy cloth in the wind, falling, falling, falling. And then nothing but a white noise filling his ears, growing louder until it was near ear-splitting and turned into tinnitus._

I don’t have to die... if I’ve got you.

_He tries to breathe but there’s no air anywhere._

_Then the shot shatters the darkness before his eyes – as it does the white filling his ears._

Goodbye.

_And the world implodes into a tiny, black spot of hurt._

John woke with a start to sobbing breaths he only realised were his own when there was Mary’s soft voice next to him. “John, it’s all right.”

“No, it’s not,” he croaked. “It’s all wrong!” He felt disoriented, sunk deeply in grainy pictures and swallowed against the bile rising in his throat, as the footage wrapped itself tight around his mind.

The solidity of Mary’s arm lying over his chest in the darkness of their little room, was all that slowly brought back to him where and when he actually was. He forced his heart rate down, taking slow, measured breaths, not wanting to wake Mary properly, but at the same time yearning for her to dispel the oppressive darkness in his head.

It had been this dream, over and over again since _that_ night, when fighting off sleep had become an impossibility (he must have gone practically without sleep for about forty hours), and Mary had refused to leave him alone, or better, let him return to Baker Street. And he could not leave her either, not after she’d learnt of her father’s death, no matter if she was putting up a front of anger and not allowing for grief yet.

John had woken them both after maybe two hours of sleep, shaking violently. Mary, still warm from sleep, had turned towards him, calming him and making the shadows of the dream recede. And when she had said in a voice that was an odd mixture of fierce and gentle, “Tell me. Tell me about him?”, he found himself doing that. For the “him”, not “it” alone, she was the most extraordinary person he had met in quite some time. He told her the facts with a little bit of the friendship that was so special to him, too precious to be forgotten or denied.

And even though she had (as he knew now) immediately caught the fact that John’s recounting of events did not match with the footage, there had been no questioning, second-guessing, weighing his words. She had merely listened, and the knowledge that here was someone sympathetic who nonetheless _really_ listened to what he was saying and did not merely let him unburden (ridiculous) his heart without taking the words he said seriously, had John eventually kiss her again. With deliberation.

“You are thinking loud enough to keep people awake, you know,” Mary now mumbled next to him.

“Sorry,” he whispered. And then, “I am sorry about your father.”

Mary stilled. They had not _really_ talked about him. Mary hadn’t wanted to, and John was the last person to push anyone into discussing matters they’d rather keep to themselves. After all, one of the most remarkable things about Mary was that she had not pushed him into saying anything more than he was ready to share, had not asked to be let in on his pain either... (Not for the first, and probably not for the last time either, John wondered if his returning to Ella time after time was the _one_ proof of his alleged masochistic tendencies. He wondered what Ella might say if he told her. She’d probably laugh and congratulate him on working that one out, eventually.)

After a minute, Mary sat up, hugging her knees to herself. “You know, I am so angry with him. It’s not fair that I miss him this badly all the time - even now that I know what he did - when he clearly never was the man I thought he was.” Mary wiped furiously at her cheeks. He envied the ease of her tears.

“He was your father.” And from what she _had_ told him of the man during their early investigations the sort of father John would, at one time, have given his left hand to have. “You know he loved you.“

“Well. He should have known the risks,” she said, slowly and very clearly, “and he didn’t love me _enough_ to stay out of it.”

John’s throat closed in answer to that. Was that really the conclusion to be drawn? Was it this easy? Of course, he had thought so himself, for quite some time. And that was when suddenly, like back when he had figured out Sherlock had been pressured into jumping, John understood something about Sherlock that he had not got before.

“Maybe it’s not that easy,” he whispered.

“I wasn’t talking about- That’s not _at all_ the same, John... Sherlock died trying to do a _good_ thing. Saving the people he loved.”

 

It was very late by now, and Mary had gone back to sleep some time back, but John couldn’t. He lay quietly, picking at Mary’s words – the idea they had turned on in his head like a light of insight.

It must have taken him this long to get there because he _had_ not put himself in Sherlock’s place up to now, had been too enmeshed in the pain and guilt Ella found so very misplaced. He had never really imagined what Sherlock would have felt in those last moments on the roof. How he could _do_ it.

And now the footage seemed like proof of a third thing, to John.

 

Ella had asked him once. What kind of friend would kill himself, knowing that John was watching, and would suffer.

 

The uncompromising quality of both men stood out against the backdrop of the game they’d been playing. The thing, like a tiny speck left by a… shared experience, that connected them was the genius quality of their minds. The comparable quickness, interconnectedness of their respective thoughts.

And yet, Sherlock and Moriarty were _nothing_ at all alike. No matter what Sherlock had believed. The idiot.

_You always want everything to be clever._ It was hard to suppress the idea that Sherlock had hated the truth in his enemy’s words, and felt challenged by the absolute consequence his adversary had shown by shooting himself.

Because, despite all this genius, John suddenly saw with blinding clarity, it was doubtful that Sherlock had fully understood what was going to happen, or rather what repercussions his actions were going to have. Because Sherlock lived in a realm of facts. Not merely in the sense that just about everyone assumed (John forgave everyone for thinking Sherlock Aspergerish, or even slightly sociopathic; he really did so long as no hatred was connected to those terms), but in the way that only things that _had happened_ , whose effects, as given facts, constituted present reality, _truly_ registered and mattered in Sherlock’s mind.

This reading explained everything. The incredible grasp of causality that led to any given piece of evidence, as the result of a reconstructable chain of cause and effect, - and the idiocy of the man when it came to hunting down, or confronting criminals. Because, as much as interpolating events based on unchangeable laws of nature was simplicity itself for him (since natural laws pretty much negated the element of time and predictions within them were no different from reconstructing a _past_ chain of events) – he was just as incapable of guessing what any human being’s reaction might possibly be to any situation.

It explained why he alienated people who recognised his genius but had not, unlike John, witnessed the very real drawbacks of a mind working in that way.

It also explained why Sherlock infallibly botched things up every single time _after_ he had solved the cases:

Leaving Baker Street with the cabbie had just been the beginning. And fuck Ella, John knew he had protected Sherlock then, and that killing the man had been the only way he could, because Sherlock would have poisoned himself for _exactly_ the reason Moriarty had been so succesful with him again.

Sherlock really should have figured out the danger General Shan would pose to them _before_ she got John and Sarah, as well. Although John was still grateful for the identity mix-up, because otherwise he surely wouldn’t have found Sherlock in time for a similar rescue operation.

The situation at the Pool… Sherlock had figured out _every_ thing, and Moriarty had _still_ had total control of the situation. Why exactly they had even got out of that one alive was still a bit of a mystery to John, really.

And then… Irene. John had never found out exactly what had happened the night that case ended. Sherlock had been as shaken as John had ever seen him until that point, but all he had been willing to tell John were some stupid comments along the lines of _Love is a defect found in the losing side_ , which was too much drama to take seriously. Mycroft had dropped some obscure remarks later on that indicated to John that Sherlock’s solving the case had been pretty close to a national catastrophe. He hadn’t asked for more information.

Baskerville had almost been an exception, although the situation in the hollow could have gone down much worse than it did, as well. That case had been worst for Sherlock, though. John would never forget the look on his face, afraid. The desperate defensiveness, that John had not known how to deal with.

Finally, the roof. Had Sherlock been afraid of dying? John pushed the thought away.

This general failure was the reason why, John was sure of it now, Sherlock couldn’t even predict his _own_ reactions most of the time, be sure of _himself_ – which had made him draw back and put on that very mask of absolute indifference that he felt he must maintain in the face of  _any_ situation.

It had cracked at the Pool. With Irene. In Baskerville. And on that roof. For a second John wondered if Sherlock had been aware of that as they were speaking for the very last time. If his reference to being a fake might have been subconsciously fed by the breakdown of that persona, and if – Stop it.

This time he didn’t need Ella to tell him that feeling pity for the fact that Sherlock let _him_ see things nobody else was allowed to see, was wrong.

 

Moriarty was the antipode, the very reversal of what characterised Sherlock’s mindscape, assuming he was right about that. The man had apparently had the capability of foreseeing each and every step any person was going to take and preclude everyone’s reactions and adaptations to circumstances, threats, hints, or pressure. Hell, he had precalculated _Sherlock’s_ reaction to Irene, and John could not but accept that feat as proof of the incredible... empathy Moriarty was able to emulate. Because calculating, forward-inferencing people’s behaviour was not exactly the same as empathy but, in Moriarty’s case surely, it was the perverted caricature of that very ability. It was, in John’s opinion, the reason you could call James Moriarty a genuine psychopath. His intellectual understanding of the human motivations, motives, needs, and limits of anyone he met, or collected enough information about, combined with an absolute lack of regard for anyone as a person, made him the perfect manipulator, puppeteer...

He _had_ made Sherlock do what he wanted him to do. Mycroft had been wrong. _Moriarty_ had got exactly what he wanted. He had won.

* * *

Small had been able to describe the location of Morstan’s death well enough for the local forces to find his remains within days. And when a person was no longer missing but dead, things started happening, more or less by themselves. The money that had sat untouched in her father’s banking account throughout the last year became part of Mary’s inheritance, together with the house her parents had owned near New York (which she said she’d consider keeping because it reminded her of her mum), a valuable arts collection (which there was no way in hell she’d keep) and a number of personal effects that he had brought to Iraq with him.

Apparently, nobody had thought about these items, or thought of sending them anywhere, before Morstan’s body was finally found. Two days after the funeral, the boxes turned up on Mary’s doorstep, while they were perusing the newspapers for flats to let. At first, Mary had not even wanted to open them, but if there was one thing about her that you could rely on, it was her curiosity.

There was everything, from clothes to camera, books, handwritten journals, and a lot of genuine, Mesopotamian sand. There was also what looked like a copy of an inscribed artefact. Mary had turned as white as a sheet.

“Fuck.”

It was the first time John had heard her use a swearword, really.

“John, I know where he hid it.” Mary had pointed at the cuneiforms, her finger trembling. “It’s on Site Four.”

 

John played with the idea of testing if Mycroft’s surveillance on him was still active, but found he did not _want_ him sitting in Baker Street. So he took Mary to the Diogenes Club instead, where the lack of surprise on Mycroft’s face gave John the answer to his question anyway.

Unfortunately, for the club’s clerks, John knew where he could expect to find Mycroft once he didn’t detect him in the lounge. So he simply walked on against the indignant hissing, and the lackeys didn’t dare grab Mary, either.

Mycroft was standing close to a tall bookshelf, and looked down his long nose at them when they entered unannounced. Mary approached him with an outstretched hand that he eyed suspiciously before taking it, reminding John more of Sherlock than he ever had before.

“Nice to meet you, Mr Holmes. I’m-”

“Don’t bother, Miss Morstan. I know perfectly well who you are and what you do. I do not know, however, to what circumstance I owe your... untimely visit here.”

John frowned and listened, as Mary, unfazed, laid out the deal they had worked out together.

“And why, Dr Morstan, would I let a foreigner like you find that immensely attractive treasure?”

Mary merely smiled. “Oh, come on. I’m practically an Oxonian now. Besides… I _am_ the only person who knows the location, and I could just as well decide to wait and lead an expedition in a few years time under the direction of my alma mater. I’m sure you see the public relations advantages for you agreeing to the plan we suggest.”

Mary handled the situation competently. Which was about the highest commendation one could get for dealing with _any_ Holmes, John felt. A quarter of an hour later, Mary and Mycroft had agreed upon the details of their little expedition, media coverage, and the degree of secrecy to be kept regarding the original looting and Mary’s father’s involvement. Mycroft had cut off her explanations about Small’s statement and the entire history of the case with an impatient gesture, and an “I know the crucial points, of course” which sped the whole thing up decisively. Mycroft was nothing if not efficient.

And just as efficiently, he tried to get rid of them as soon as the deal was struck, getting up and herding them towards the exit. “That was all, I take it. You will receive your tickets with-”

“Why did you do it? Delete his ‘note’?” John asked, standing his ground in front of the closed door.

“Excuse me?”

“I am not an idiot, Mycroft. I do remember what he said to me on the phone, and you took his ‘note’ out of the footage. Why?”

“Do you think I don’t care about my brother’s legacy, at all?”

“Sorry for not trusting altruism, coming from you.” John might have felt his conscience if it was anyone but Mycroft he was talking to. “I assume you feared it might reflect badly on you if Sherlock were to denounce himself, even though evidence had finally proven his innocence.”

“How… perceptive of you.” Mycroft’s face was a bland mask.

“Is it?”

Mycroft walked back to his chair and sat, steepling his fingers.

“I know, it’s not like it would actually matter to Sherlock that he comes across like a complete nutter now, thanks to that video, but I just don’t get _why_ you haven’t given them the truth. That he saved others by his suicide.” Some little, jittery part of John feared Mycroft would just laugh at him.

“Ah, but you know how he detested heroism,” Mycroft replied.

“Must be a family trait.”

Mycroft swallowed, and there was something on the tip of his tongue, but he didn’t speak again. John closed the door behind himself and Mary.

“Wow. He doesn’t like me,” she said when they stepped out into the sunny late summer’s day.

“Don’t mind him. He doesn’t like anyone.”

“He likes you.”

John rolled his eyes but didn’t bother to comment. Mary was probably right; in his compulsory way, Mycroft probably did. “And what do you make of him?”

“He’s… something else,” Mary decided. “What _is_ he?”

“Actually, I don’t know. Probably the government, more or less…”

They walked on in silence, for a while.

“Were they anything alike?” she finally asked.

“No!” he exclaimed. “Well. In some ways. Maybe.”

* * *

Two days later, things were packed and ready. Three days later, they were back in London, negotiating timetables, space,... lives. (Mary had got a message from Molly that she’d found the perfect little flat for her.) But it wasn’t difficult to do, and for the first time in forever, it felt as if he _had_ some kind of life, at all. Even if he didn’t trust it yet.

They worked on Mary’s new flat, and although it was clear she saw it as _their_ home, there was no question of giving up Baker Street, or of him not going there anymore. They never stayed there overnight together, because sometimes John needed to be alone and remember.

It was strange to have another living soul there, where for so long there had only been a memory. Things moved while he was gone, all the small things he had not even noticed the first time round, when _Sherlock_ had suddenly been there in his life – and then gone...

Otherwise, he did spend a lot of time at the new place, too. It all went suspiciously well.

About a week after they had returned to London, John came home (to Baker Street) early from his shift at the clinic, to find his sister amiably chatting with Mary.

“She’s interesting,” his sister told him as he took her to the door.

“I don’t think I’ve _ever_ heard you say that about one of my girlfriends before.”

“Surely not. None of them were.” She kissed his cheek and vanished with a wave of her hand. No hint of alcohol anywhere on her breath, her skin, her hair, her clothes. John knocked on the wood of the door frame, just to be on the safe side.

 

“John? We need to talk.”

He had known this was going to happen, he told himself, stitching the smile onto his face before turning around. Mustn’t have worked.

“It’s not something bad,” Mary immediately said. “At least I _hope_ it’s not...”

Strange dread ran through him, and out of his mouth came: “You’re not pregnant!” Not very diplomatic, not with the sheer panic in his voice.

Mary gave a laugh at that, “Gods, no!” She sobered up, looking nervous, all of a sudden. “It’s just... what would you say if I asked you to marry me?”


	23. Running

John had thought he’d long since stopped caring if Mycroft still kept surveillance on him, but his immediate reaction to seeing not-Anthea, lounging against a sleek black car at the next corner made him re-assess that notion. It should be possible for him to walk around in this city and not wonder if security cameras might be following his every move. He should be allowed to leave the flat of his... he should be allowed to vanish for a few hours without someone coming after him like he was a badly behaved child. And if he needed to walk until his hand on the cane blistered in order to clear his head, and make sense of the cluttered chaos that was his mind, he damned well had a right to do that.

_What would you say if I asked you..._

John sullenly approached the darkly-clad, elegant woman, typing on her smartphone as usual. How she even noticed it was him was a mystery. “Hello, John.”

“What does he want from me now?” His voice was gravelly, as he limped the last steps towards her.

“Oh, don’t be like that.” She opened the car door for him.

Then again... Maybe not-Anthea was exactly the person he needed now. “You know what? I _have_ to talk about something with him.”

“Maybe after your appointment with your therapist?”

_Fuck._ John glared, got into the car.

“Mycroft doesn’t even believe in therapy,” he pointed out as Mycroft’s P.A. settled down next to him. Pursing her lips, but never gracing him with a second of eye contact, she replied:

“Oh, he believes in the benefit of giving people what _they_ believe they need.”

John felt anger pull at his insides in what he couldn’t help but read as the confirmation of his suspicions concerning Mycroft. His voice seemed to project this, seeing how Not-Anthea looked up from her Blackberry for more than three seconds for the first time. “How _considerate_ of him.”

“You really have no idea.” Her attention was firmly back on her tool of world-domination now, as she ordered the driver to take them to Dr Thompson’s practice.

 

“Mary asked m-me to marry her, go abroad with her.” For the first time - since that morning he had figured out why Sherlock had jumped – John told Ella something without prompting.

The early autumn sunlight filtering in through the tall windows painted a glaring circle on Ella’s chest, as she leaned forward in her chair.

“And you were very sorry to have to turn her down?”

John crossed his arms. “I’m _not_ here to ask for your approval, or p-permission.”

Ella smiled, showing teeth. “Are you sure about that?”

“Very sure.”

“So you have said yes?” The pause John let build was too long, answering the question in itself. Ella cocked her head to the side. “Why would you want to marry her?”

“Because I love her?” It was not meant to be a question. He loved her. He wasn’t thinking, he loved _her_.

“Because she’s in love with you?” Ella suggested with a deceptive smile. “You have to tell her no, anyway. Better do it now, rather than later, when she’s become too accustomed to the idea.”

“What-” John forced himself to calm down. “All right. Could you... Just back off.” Why did everyone think lately that they had a right to tell him how to live his life? _That’s what you get for being this fucking weak_ , a nasty voice whispered.

“I won’t. Because you’re being as unfair to this woman as you are to yourself, if you go through with this. I understand, John.” Ella’s voice was all soft now. “You both lost someone important, but that’s not enough to build a relationship on, much less is it a basis for a marriage. What you _think_ you know about her is not really there.”

“I know enough.”

“You absolutely don’t. Neither does she. And you know it.”

“Coming here was a mistake.” John’s voice was almost too low to be heard. Ella was surely overstepping every line of professionalism, not to speak of propriety, now.

“Because you don’t get to hear what you like?”

“Because Mary is _n-not_ p-part of this therapy.”

Ella pursed her lips. The way she tipped her head was very much like Mycroft’s favourite expression when he dealt with stupid John.

Two minutes ticked away in silence.

“It seems I should also have pointed out, last time, that if you think what I said at Sherlock’s grave is going to go away by _running away_ , you’re also in for a bad surprise.”

John felt his fingers steady. “I _don’t_ run.”

Ella merely laughed. “ _You_ are trying to run as fast as possible from the hurt, the desperation you’ve driven yourself into over the last year. And you think, getting involved with Mary is helping you. Because she made things happen to you again, and now you imagine that she is like your friend in some way. But you only perceive character traits in her that you _declare_ more significant than the rest because he was the same in certain respects. You won’t be able to keep up that pretense forever, John.”

His anger was boiling, heating up so quickly that he hardly knew where to begin, and the words got stuck on his tongue.

“Knowing your chivalrous self-concept, you surely tell yourself you are making things better for her, as well. But what it comes down to is that you are following the one pattern that governs all your life – your standard behavioural programme, an instinct that by now you have lost the ability to question. Because you’d do _anything_ to escape from taking your life into your own hands: You wait for life to dictate your course of action. You are happy to let others make your choices. You seek orders. I bet it’s what drove you to the Army, as well – and now you are using Mary as the next best opportunity for _running away_ from the place where drifting through life like this has taken you –”

“You should shut the fuck up about things you haven’t got a _fucking_ clue about.” The words tore from his mouth with vicious force, and little to no control. “I get it that you have a problem with me having killed people. But it’s _not_ like I had a choice about going into the Army. And going there _was_ making my own decisions, best I possibly could, back then. And I’ve _never_ run away from danger. _I am no coward_!”

Ella’s eyes were wide, but not, it struck John, from the violence of his outburst – in which he had, of course, said far too much of what he had not intended to let Ella know, at all. And he had just repeated the very words he’d said at Sherlock’s grave ...

“Nobody says you are. I know full well that you don’t run from danger.” She stumbled over the thought, rephrasing: “You don’t run from _danger_. You run from –” Ella’s eyes grew even rounder, incredulous. “I _see_! I was wrong, wasn’t I? This desperate need to be useful to _some_ one... Your willingness to kill for him... This isn't you being _protective_ \- it’s you not being able to deal with loss.” Ella studied the white shock her words hat put into John’s face. “ _Loss_ is what you have been running from. All your life.”

“O-of... This-“ He made himself form the words, with hardly and idea what he was actually trying to say. “You are being ridiculous. I am a _doctor_. Lots of people have _died_ on me. Of course I can...”

Ella was watching his toneless mumbling coldly. “As long as you don’t feel any close connection to those you lose, maybe. I admit, becoming a doctor, _and_ a soldier was a stroke of genius, considering your ‘skill’ of keeping people at arm’s length. Nonetheless, losing anyone of such importance as _he_ held for you... is utterly beyond you.” Ella went on, quietly, “And so there was only one thing you could do when you _did_ lose him, and your subconscious did it: try and resolutely negate, erase, what he _really_ was to you.”

If Sally Donovan was reminiscent of a terrier, Ella was a bloodhound. And he was sure that if he moved a hair’s breadth now, he would be torn apart by her.

“Or have you got any other explanation for _why_ you can’t make yourself say it?” Ella whispered.

_Because it’s not true._ John imagined himself retorting snarkily. He got no further than drawing breath.

“You were _this_ close to admitting it, that day we visited his grave. _This_ close,” she repeated, pressing her forefinger to her thumb. “So forgive me for not being glad that Mary Morstan turned up right when she did ... You’ve retreated into shutting up again, because she offered you something you imagine is a way out. As if _not_ speaking the words might actually change anything about their validity – and as if, by extension, the loss had not happened to you, at all.”

“And you talk like _saying_ something could change anything about reality,” John replied, hoarsely, his mind replaying those grainy images again that had him seek shelter in Mary’s arms, and the bright red on the pavement, that burnt into his eyes, as he shut them now against Ella’s searching gaze.

“We both believe that it does, don’t we? Or you would have acknowledged the truth long ago.”

“Have you _ever_ – just once - considered you might be wrong?” John asked after a few deep breaths, his voice rough, trying so hard to sound reasonable.

“I’m not wrong. I misjudged you, though. I... miscalculated, maybe. I was so sure you’d be able to...” Ella broke off, resting her chin on her interwoven fingers. “But I’m not wrong. For a terribly long time I thought you had been, and still were, too afraid of saying them for fear of rejection.”

John felt too numb to protest, or do anything but blink.

“For the most part, that explanation makes perfect sense: You have made it more than clear that you do feel guilty. And yet, I misunderstood. Because what you have lost simply isn’t enough to explain the state you’re in.”

John would strongly object, but it took him far too long to find words, and Ella was going on.

“For God’s sake. You are no love-struck teenager, suddenly confronted with the fact that _loss_ is ultimately waiting for everyone – and not only are you a doctor, as you’ve pointed out so astutely a minute ago, you are also a soldier. And we both know that you are well acquainted with death. Therefore, I think neither of us is so naive as to assume that it was loving Sherlock that had you suffering like this for the last year. Because that realisation in itself, I’m sure, would not have knocked you off your feet.”

“Cou-could you stop saying I -” He positively hated himself for his voice breaking. “There was nothing between us.” _I am not gay_ , he’d said once. Hell, he’d said it, or something to that effect, a _million_ times. Not that it had done any good.

“No, because you kill people for anyone. I know.”

“It was not like _that_ between us. Fuck. The only person Sherlock ever showed any interest in, at _all_ , was surely not me.”

“And in how far is that relevant to anything?”

“Because I’m not stupid enough to-“ John broke off, a strange ringing noise in his ears.

Ella smiled. “Thanks for clearing that up.”

John blinked, mutely.

“I suggest you listen now, and carefully. I’ll make you a prediction: You’ll continue feeling guilty. You will keep explaining that guilt as you having failed your friend. Having _lost_ him. And maybe you _did_ , but surely not in the manner you assume. You are still failing him by denying the possibilities. And that is why you are this obsessed with self-justification, convincing yourself it was no act of cowardice. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No, I don’t.” Truthfully.

“It’s only things that will never be that can hurt this much. And that means this is not _really_ about guilt at all; it’s about _regret_.”

“Regret?” he croaked, feeling a tight little knot in his stomach.

“Nothing but regret is strong enough to have people suffer like you do, for this long. And that is how I know I am right. Despite all your self-delusion and defensiveness. Regret for the things that will never come to pass now. I guess _nothing_ is more hideous than the loss of a possibility, a future.” Ella paused. John kept very still.

“What causes this pain is that you weren’t afraid he might _not_ return your feelings – it was the very possibility that he did! Am I right?”

 

That last question, so Sherlock, stopped John’s thoughts for a millisecond. Then the laugh bubbled up from inside, forcing itself out as a hiccoughing giggle that sounded hysterical even to his own ears.

“Are you... Are you seriously implying now, that... that Sherlock was interested in _me_? ‘Cause if you are, you are _so_ wrong, you cannot even begin to imagine how much!”

“Really?”

John sobered a little, recognising the seriousness in Ella’s eyes. “He was not like that. Not _at_ _all_.”

“Not like what?”

“Well... You wouldn’t... you’d _never_ say this, if you had met him. You know what he said? _Love is a defect found in the losing side._ ”

“How... immature.”

John shrugged, irritated. “Maybe, yes.”

“And you took that to mean he could not possibly love you?”  
John felt like caught in a mirror world. Hell, he had become accustomed to Ella, like _every_ one else believing he was in love with Sherlock. But turning the tables like this... made him strangely nauseous. As if she was steering somewhere he couldn’t see yet. Although the tingling feeling on the back of his neck warned him it was not a destination he wanted to go to.

“I, unlike you, merely know him well enough to be sure he didn’t _care_ about that kind of thing.”

Ella pursed her lips. “I wonder if you are really this naive, or if you aim to protect yourself by maintaining this fiction.”

“It’s not a fiction. It was not in his... set-up. Maybe he deleted it along with the solar system. Or something,” John protested, close to frantic in his need to make Ella understand that _this_ was not going to happen. “He didn’t react properly to Irene ‘The Woman’ Adler, for heaven’s sake. And she _was_ intent on making him react, believe me.”

“Oh, really? Yes, he would...” Ella mused, with a strange forlorn look in her eyes that piqued John’s interest. Then she collected herself, from wherever her thoughts had gone for a minute. “Well, as illuminating as it is to hear this evidence of his disinclination to fall for powerplay as the receiving party... _what_ bearing do you think that has on what he wanted from you, John?”

There were too many insinuations in that one sentence for John to pick apart, so he settled for the one option he trusted himself to manage, and with no difficulty this time, because he _knew_ Ella was wrong: Honesty.

“I _know_ Sherlock wanted a lot of things from me. He was…” and John only realised how true this was, as he was voicing it to get Ella understand, “… not needy exactly, but starved for the least little bit of appreciation, honest appreciation. God, he soaked up my admiration for his brilliant mind like a sponge. He liked me to be there, accompanying him; navigating the waters of politically correct behaviour; helping him think, from time to time. And yes, for _some_ reason I was the only one he seemed to be willing to take these things from. But he definitely never thought about me the way you are implying... romantically, or anything. Fuck. He _told_ me, the first evening.”

“He told you _what_?”

John recounted the awkward stake-out dinner at Angelo’s, ending with “Told me it didn’t even matter if it was men or women. I thought he was having me on, at first, but he really was _married... to... his_ -” Watching Ella’s reaction, the words died on his lips.

“Oh my god! I see.” Her face had gone almost blank. He had rarely before taken the time, or the step back from his own position, to appreciate that Ella was one hell of a clever woman – if not exactly likeable. Behind her eyes, he saw the pieces tumbling, turning, and heard the ‘click’ when she had finally solved it – and looked at him as if he was a finished puzzle, with a slight gleam of pride and the superiority a player might exhibit towards a toy. He waited, aware that his pulse was well above average by now.

“ _That_ was it. That was when it started, when the self-censorship began! You profess to care about others’ opinions, when actually, you’ve only been trying, all this time, to make sure you wouldn’t let what happened then happen again. Stupid of me. There was no way in hell you’d be able to even admit it might be there, not after you had resolutely denied its existence to _him_.

You think you made in un-happen, but you didn’t. He called you on something you, very likely, really didn’t know yourself then – and he drew a line that you, brave, obedient, _scared_ as you are, made sure never to even _see_ again,” she laughed. “Can’t you see, how funny this is, really? You haven’t questioned a single deduction the man ever made, but you tell me that _this_ is the one he got wrong?”

“It- It w-wasn’t... He w-wasn’t deducing me,” John croaked. “It was ju...just a stupid-”

Ella’s raised eyebrow had him stutter to a halt. “You know that’s nonsense. He _knew_.”

John felt like someone had kicked him in the chest, an he had to actively remind himself to shut his mouth and breathe through his nose. Ella was mad if she really believed what she was saying.

“His own words are the reason your mind’s stuck on admitting this. You _can’t_. And you couldn’t, even while he was alive. You didn’t dare ask yourself if that line was still even there! And you are incapable of recognising how unreasonable that really is.”  
“Be-because he’s dead, you mean?”

“Because people _change_ , John!” Ella sounded exasperated. “You built all those walls and refuse to see anything contradicting those words, simply turning a blind eye to how obviously they didn’t hold true anymore after a certain point. Did you listen to yourself, a minute ago? All the things you’ve told me about him – those that showed in each and every line, and a lot of times between them – what you meant to him? How he did his best to scare away your lovers... You cite him walking around in a sheet, and seriously tell me he didn’t realise what reaction that was getting from you? You keep telling me he sacrificed himself to protect you – and, after everything else you’ve told me about him, about his personality, you don’t see that any explanation _other_ than him reciprocating your feelings is nonsensical?”

“Stop it.” John’s head was spinning, and not in the pleasant, tipsy sort of way. His fingers tightened around his cane. “Fuck. This is bullshit!”

“It very much isn’t. This is the one explanation that actually covers the weirdness you described to me as your life with him. But now, I finally know how that _co_ in co-dependency worked between the two of you...”

“What?”

“Never thought I’d say this, but I think I feel sorry for Sherlock Holmes. Turns out you were not the only one bound by this relationship after all. I said it was a _co-_ dependency from early on, but clearly it was more balanced than I first assumed. You taking orders and the danger he offered, and he yearning for approval, and recognition of what there was between you. One of which he never got, and probably never would have, seeing how you would never have admitted it, had he not killed himself.”

“I am not listening to this nonsense anymore.” John was on his feet (hardly even limping, although he didn’t notice) and two steps from the door, before he checked the impulse to... well, _leave_.

“And yet you’re running from my... _nonsense_?” Ella smiled her tight, deprecating smile at him from her comfortable armchair. “You fear losing people too much to let anyone truly in; which is what makes everyone leave eventually... You have been caught in this vicious circle, for ages. You do know that Mary has only proposed to you because she understood all this about you, don’t you? She knew that, after what happened with Sherlock, you needed proof beyond the shadow of a doubt that she is not going to leave you.”

“He didn’t leave.” John couldn’t help saying back, opening the door and feeling the cool air of the hallway against the side of his too-warm face. “And you are _wrong_ about him.”

Ella was approaching him now, her arms crossed over her chest.

He stepped over the threshold. “Do not expect to see me again.“

“ _Love is a defect found in the losing side_ , right? Well. As I see it, Sherlock did lose against James Moriarty.” And with that, Ella shut the door in his face.

* * *

“What the fuck is _this_?” John smashed the letter onto the smooth dark wood of the little table, next to Mycroft’s tea. _The_ letter. The one that had elicited Mary’s utterly unexpected question this morning. The one that had, in effect, ruined the little bit of peace John had found lately. Anger was coursing through him like a current as Ella’s words replayed in his head. How _could_ she...

“It seems to be a letter. As to its contents-”

“Mycroft.” There was a note of warning to John’s voice that gave the older Holmes pause.

“Very well. Why don’t you tell me what it is?”

The need to lash out, at someone _responsible_ (i.e., not Mary) had made him come straight to the Diogenes Club. And seeing Sherlock’s older brother now, playing his standard act once more, John’s anger turned into a burning sensation that, for the first time, made his palms truly itch with the urge to wipe that supercilious smile off. “Because you _know_! Because I don’t know anybody else who could pull strings from this high up. Because this offer is too... good to be true.”

“You feel Miss Morstan’s latest accomplishments might not have warranted an offer of this nature?”

“You tell me you had nothing to do with it, then?” John challenged, trying to get an outright lie from the man.

“Should you not be happy for your... friend, if this offer is as exceptional as you say?”

Two years consulting for the Iraqi government, coordinating and organising the beginnings of a fresh start in scientific archaeological exploration in the cradle of human civilisation. Mary had been euphoric, completely stunned, incredibly happy. Enough out of her mind to ask him -

John’s shoulders slumped. “So you _did_ make it happen.”

“Maybe you’re overrating your importance in the overall scheme of things a little here, John?”

“Is there? A scheme of things?”

Mycroft glared. Strange, how John had never really been able to feel intimidated by this intimidating man.

“Just tell me: Is this offer meant to get rid of Mary?”

“That would not be a very subtle way of doing things,” Mycroft pointed out, close to indignant.

“You really think you’re usually being _subtle_?”

The glower intensified. “More to the point: Why on earth would I do such a thing?”

“ _That_ is what I don’t get. But it’s not like you’re not a compulsory meddler in things that don’t concern you.”

“Very much not true. I only meddle in things that _do_.”

“What? Like reigning Sherlock’s life?”

Mycroft’s posture changed instantly, leaning back in his chair, relaxing. John felt he had made a crucial mistake, stepped into a snare. “A bit more of my ‘meddling’ might have spared us this very situation.”

“A lot _less_ of it might have, too,” John grated.

“You _really_ think I didn’t care about my brother, don’t you?”

John shook his head slightly. “No. I think that you have no idea how to care about people. You think making decisions for them, monitoring them, is the same thing as caring. But it is not.”

“John, this is a pointless-”

“Did you have a hand in killing Irene Adler?” The possibility struck him, all of a sudden.

Two blinks. “Excuse me?”

“Don’t give me that look. You don’t stop at scheming to influence _my_ life, even now. Even when we are…” He stopped himself. “I’m sure you had no scruples _managing_ Sherlock’s, when that seemed expedient.”

“And you theorise that _I_ killed Irene Adler to stop her exerting her... influence on my brother?” There was a small smile on Mycroft’s lips now.

_Influence._ The word, with its brittle politician’s equivocation raised John’s hackles, and the words – not a question, and yet exactly that – were out before he was sure if he wanted to know, really. “I think you were afraid that Sherlock might be in love with her.”

“John...”

Silence fell and lay there for a minute.

“Irene Adler was important. But not in the way you seem to assume...” Mycroft seemed lost in a very specific memory for a second, one that had him set his jaw and look anything but pleased. “Quite the opposite of what you appear to assume.”

“And what the fuck is _that_ supposed to mean?” Gods, he was so sick of this! First Ella, and now Mycroft, of all people! Who should have been the one person to understand –

“You know, I was there, too. I _saw_ them together.” And he knew very well what he had seen, no matter how ambivalent his own feelings towards that woman had been.

Sherlock had been unlike John had ever seen him that Christmas night, when he had gone to identify Irene’s body, distraught to a degree that had nothing to do with his usual reaction to a new body: excitement. And Mycroft _had_ damned well known it, too. _Danger night_ , indeed.

It had been during the Belgravia case that John had first wondered about Sherlock’s ability to love, or alleged lack thereof. _Really_ wondered. It was incomprehensible... John had a vivid recollection of that day in Buckingham Palace and Mycroft’s taunts. John was well aware that sex and love were no necessary pair, but while sex often happened without love (and he would not have been surprised _at all_ to learn that Sherlock had undertaken it as some kind of experiment), he had great difficulty imagining love that did not, at some point, take the step to involve sex. So Mycroft’s cutting remark, to John, meant that Sherlock had indeed never been in love – as far as his brother knew. And let’s face it, he would have known. So between him, Mrs Hudson, and John not knowing of any sort of relationship, the only deduction could be, no matter how preposterous it seemed, that Sherlock had never let himself in on the whole concept of love (which still seemed a terribly sad idea to John). But he knew this had changed, it _had_ been there with Irene.

“He never told you what she did, did he?” Mycroft interrupted his train of thoughts.

The answer to this was a resounding _no_ , in John’s mind, that he didn’t bother to voice out loud: he had asked Sherlock exactly once about that night all he knew about was that its unlikely venue had been an aeroplane, and when no answer was forthcoming… John remembered the absent looks out of their living room windows, the recurrence of the violin piece that had made its first appearance after Christmas. There had been enough evidence of Sherlock thinking about her to make any conversation superfluous, in John’s book. Sherlock had been more openly emotional than he had ever been before. Than he had been at the pool, or… ever. John felt his stomach roll, sitting rather suddenly.

“In the end, Irene Adler proved to Sherlock that being... attached to people was the safest way to failure.”

“So, she won? He... he did lose against her...” John had suspected as much, but still had great difficulty imagining it.

Mycroft smiled thinly. “He _almost_ did.”


	24. Five Hundred and One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is the counterpart to [ Five Hundred and One](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1026410/chapters/2043535) in the companion piece Congenial Conclusion.

She knew. She might not understand _every_ thing, but she clearly must know him well enough to have no doubts how John reacted to being warned about someone… He turned the idea over and over again in his head, never reaching a conclusion whether Ella did not _mean_ for him to go through with marrying Mary, after all. Were all her warnings to the contrary nothing but sophisticated means to manipulate him?

He gave up on divining her purpose, as the dread of the deadline - the day when he would have lived as long without Sherlock again as they’d had together - creeping up in his head became suffocating and made him think he didn’t care either way.

He had had to admit to himself that Ella had not been entirely wrong with her analysis... Running _was_ another instinct John had developed early in life, like relying on nobody. How many times had he left the flat, had run from Sherlock’s abrasiveness, like he had run out into the moor when he couldn’t stand watching and listening to Sherlock... But running _away_ had not been an option ever since he’d first defended himself and Harry at the age of fourteen. Still, he couldn’t suppress the need to get distance between himself and whatever threatened him, move his feet, walk off his instinctive fighting response (another something he had caught, like an infection, during those formative years). If only to get back to fight with a clear head.

_“What would you say if I asked you to marry me?”_

_“What?” had been all he could get out with the little air he was able to muster._

_Mary had waved the letter at him, telling him everything in a rush, glowing with the absolutely unexpected adventure and excitement it promised._

_“And what am I going to do? Knit jumpers?”_

_“Don’t be ridiculous. You could work at the clinic they are starting for training local doctors.”_

_“Mary... just because I’ve given two injections...”_

_“Laura would be more than happy to have you.”_

_He stared._

_“Were those all the objections you had in store? Because I’m still waiting for an answer to my questions here.”_

And John had panicked that morning, fled. Ella _was_ right. And now it was time to stop the running act altogether...

On day four hundred ninety-seven, he told Mary yes. The next day he went to ask Lestrade to be his best man.

 

The door to the office floor was wide open, when John climbed the stairs for the first time in almost five-hundred days. He couldn’t help counting.

Things had changed at NSY, but the overall impression of busy movement, people thinking while pacing between flipcharts, computers and the large windows looking out over the city was the same. John stood and stared, not letting himself dwell on the sudden constricting feeling around his chest.

The large office formerly assigned to Lestrade was filled with pot plants, colourful art prints and had a distinctly female air to it... John looked around searchingly. The first plain-clothes officer he asked for directions to DI Lestrade’s new office gave him a quick once-over, labelled him harmless, and helpfully filled him in that Lestrade had moved, more than a year ago, after some serious run-in with the Chief Superintendent. She pointed him to a notably smaller cubicle at the far end.

Through the inset glass pane in the office’s door, John could see Lestrade standing with his hands braced against the window frame. The posture had something slightly disconcerting about it.

Opening the door and saying “Hello, Greg.”, the familiar lanky silhouette of Mycroft and his umbrella in the visitor’s chair stopped John dead in his tracks.

Lestrade’s face was... ashen, as he turned around. “John.”

This was not the kind of conversation John had had in mind. Less awkward would have been fine by him...

Mycroft turned around in the swivel chair with the precision of an automaton, a quick glance passing over John that he was still too accustomed to to mind.

“The happy announcement, then.” Mycroft studiously looked down at his shoes. “One would have assumed you’d had quite enough of that kind of whirlwind romance.” When he looked up, his face was inscrutable.

But John remembered only too well Mycroft’s snide remarks at their very first meeting. “God. And I would have bet _you_ at least knew those rumours to be exactly that.”

Mycroft mumbled something unintelligible.

“What?”

“Nothing at all.”

John gave him his very best stare; and Mycroft evaded his eyes.

“Congratulations are in order, I suppose,” he said with the enthusiasm of a true civil servant.

“John-“ Lestrade said once more, but couldn’t get past his name, again.

“Are you all right?”

“He is,” Mycroft said.

“Well, you must know.” John looked suspiciously from one man to the other.

“We have... unpleasant business to talk about,” Mycroft explained.

“Well, talking about unpleasant business... I guess Mary tripped up your plan a bit. But I take it you won’t go back on that offer, Mycroft.”

“I honestly don’t know what you are talking about, John.” Mycroft took a step towards him, standing so close now, that their toes were almost touching. “I would never act against your own best interest.”

The words caused an unpleasant shiver down John’s back – for once, Mycroft sounded utterly sincere.

“Just stuff it. The _only_ person – beside yourself - whose interests you paid the least bit of attention to was Sherlock.”

Mycroft’s mouth opened and closed silently before he answered “Yes.”

* * *

Three days after this episode, John found himself drawn to Baker Street, as surely as a moth to the flame.

It was quite late: the first joyless cases of a Halloween night had kept him at the surgery for longer than his shift really ought to have lasted – but he surely didn’t mind as much distraction as possible today. As he started his meandering walk to what he couldn’t help but think of as _home_ still, the streets were not exactly crowded, since most parties had started by now. The atmosphere was a bit more festive than usual, though. He passed a few pubs that had jumped on the Halloween wagon (judging by the pumpkins and fake cotton spider webs in their windows) to draw more patrons on a weekday. John watched a skeleton and a witch sauntering along across the street, followed by a darkly clad gentleman in period clothes and a top-hat, who presumably impersonated Jack the Ripper. Not even half bad…

Something about the stuffy clothing reminded him of Mycroft again. John huffed, recalling the shock of seeing the man twice in such a short time. And in Lestrade’s office, of all places… Was he turning paranoid for the fact that he was convinced they’d been talking about _him_ in that office? Why else _would_ Mycroft have been there? He guessed Mycroft had updated the DI on what was going to happen, in spite of all his best efforts… John gritted his teeth. He would have sworn Lestrade to be the one person to be happy for him. Now it looked like it might be the smallest wedding in history, with only Molly, Mrs Hudson and Harry to attend. Mary’s friend Molly – who still tried fleeing the room when John was there. Well, at least they had _one_ witness, while John was still left with the problem of not having a best man.

Alone in the street again, John wondered if the counting in his head would stop tomorrow… if tomorrow would feel any different… if _he_ would feel different on the five hundred and _second_ day after his life shattered. He had that strange, slightly out-of-body experience, of time passing at a different pace around him.

Maybe it was not really such a good idea to spend this night alone, but he was already almost there now. Turning the corner to Baker Street eventually, John frowned up at the light in their living room that Mrs Hudson must have left on.

 

He did not see this coming. No premonitions. No ghostly presence making itself felt via goosebumps. No more than there had _always_ been here, anyway. John threw his jacket on the hook down in the hall, and began the arduous way up the stairs. Then he simply shoved the door open and limped straight in, before he noticed the other person in the room.

A weak “Oh. God.” escaped his lips as he drew a last halting breath with great difficulty, then he simply doubled over, clutching his middle, while his knees gave out under him so he was collapsing quite gracefully, curling in on himself; unable to catch a single breath he felt very much like the wind had been knocked of of him by a brutal blow.

Fighting for air, swallowing frantically against the huge dry lump clotting his throat, he felt two years’ worth of tears rush to his eyes – the horrible fear and utter loneliness of all that time draining out. It was just too much for one person to take, too much to feel at one time.

The tears started violently now and as he... got his breath back, he began sobbing, crying eventually.

It took him a long while to realise that Sherlock was whispering to him incessantly. _John, please. Please, don’t. John, shhh, please, stop crying._ That the warmth suffusing his body came from Sherlock curled protectively around the tiny, cracking ball that was John Watson.

 

Once more he did things the wrong way round. He was not in shock because of Sherlock’s sudden reappearance, his return of the dead. He was, eventually, coming _out_ of shock after almost eighteen months of fighting to stay in that state (and really, who in their right mind worked to _stay in shock_?)in order to not have to return to a reality entirely unbearable. And even though his rational mind had long since processed events and acknowledged the reality of Sherlock’s death, his heart had simply ceased to accept anything of what was going on as relevant and real. No, he had never got out of the shocked state that he had plummeted into that horrible day at Bart’s.

Eventually, John slipped into a state half sleep and half unconsciousness. He was vaguely aware of Sherlock laying him carefully on the sofa, covering him with some blanket and settling down next to him on the floor.

The circle of his fingers did not let go of Sherlock’s wrist, not once.

 

_fin_

**Author's Note:**

> This story was published on ff.net before, originally under the pseud of elenthari, but will be revised as I go along updating here.  
> And, belatedly, I realise that I have actually forgotten to name the one person I owe for the vast majority of the fun that writing fanfiction is - and who (unknowingly what that would entail, I guess) volunteered to beta for me, when she found this story in its prior, less honed (or even correct ;)) incarnation: the absolutely unprecendented, wise, beyond well-read, sharpen-every-sentence-to-the-most-beautiful-not-a-single-word-in-excess-form Impractical_Beekeeping. xxx


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